> strikes with so little warning: a system transitions from entirely fine to one that is entirely (and mysteriously!) non-functional in a single transaction th

> strikes with so little warning: a system transitions from entirely fine to one that is entirely (and mysteriously!) non-functional in a single transaction that's half true. After vacuum_freeze_table_age postgres will automatically start freeze-only autovacuum processes with very low i/o priority. Unless you have tweaked that value, it's set to 150M which is way below the 2^32 hard failure point. From then on, postgres will also start warning you about this in the log file. If you ignore this, once you're at 2^32-10M transactions, every single query to the database will yield a WARNING including a nice countdown that will count down how many transaction can still be processed before armageddon. Only if you also ignore these, you will eventually run into the problem. So while I agree that it's a very real problem, I really don't agree that it's a problem which strikes with "little warning". Postgres is very much yelling at you as it starts panicking.