PostgreSQL Troubleshooting in the Real World

This month's Cloud Austin Meetup will be hosted at ECS Region 13, the new home for Cloud Austin! We're being joined by the Austin Postgres User Group this month! They're back in business, and they'll be having their next event two days after us.

Our speaker, Umair Shahid from Stormatics, is also one of the new hosts for the Austin Postgres User Group. This talk was just presented at Postgres Summit US!
---

## Killing the Cron Job: Rescuing a Production Odoo Workload on PostgreSQL

When we walked in, every query running longer than three minutes was being killed by a cron job. That cron job was the only thing keeping the system standing, and it was hiding everything that was actually broken. Core financial reports were taking over thirty minutes to run, most of them never finishing. CPU was pinned, IOPS were spiking, and bulk delete operations on operational tables were taking more than two hours.

This talk walks through the effort on a high-volume Odoo deployment, with the actual numbers from the engagement. Phase one was about stopping the bleeding: right-sizing the resources and tuning parameters against the observed workload. Reports that previously failed to complete in over thirty minutes now finish in under two minutes. Phase two was about finding what was structurally broken: a multi-day measurement window using pg_gather against real production traffic, the discovery of nine high-volume transactional tables with missing foreign key indexes, and a targeted index strategy that the workload immediately validated. Bulk deletes that previously took more than 120 minutes now complete in approximately 62 minutes. Temporary file generation dropped from 280 GB per day to 192.9 GB per day. Read IOPS spikes during business hours fell from 10–15 per day to 5–7 per day.

The talk's central argument is uncomfortable but useful: every safety mechanism that "fixes" a performance problem without addressing root cause is a tarp over the hole in the floor. The teams that get out of this trap learn to measure twice. Once urgently, to stop the bleeding so the business can keep running. Once patiently, with a real observation window, to find what is actually broken.
---
Umair Shahid is the founder of Stormatics, a specialist database services firm built to Elevate PostgreSQL in production. He works with fintechs, SaaS companies, and enterprises to design and run production-grade systems: resilient architectures, performance under load, security hardening, and migrations from proprietary databases across cloud and on-prem environments.

With more than two decades in the ecosystem, Umair is a subject matter expert who is regularly invited to speak at industry conferences. He publishes practical blogs and benchmark-driven white papers reaching more than 15,000 readers each month.