I don't think PostgreSQL has issues with max_connections, it'll simply start rejecting new connection requests (as pointed out by davidgould). What we see in p

I don't think PostgreSQL has issues with max_connections, it'll simply start rejecting new connection requests (as pointed out by davidgould). What we see in practice, though, is that people often increase max_connections to rather insane values. There's only a certain number of active connections each box can support (say, ~2*cores, sometimes more), and it's one of the things we check whenever a customer contacts us with performance issues. Oh, you increased max_connections to 7243, it was running fine for a while and then you got a short burst of activity on Monday morning and it's crawling out of the rack? pgbouncer FTW in most cases (in transaction pooling mode).