Per-Backend Statistics: See What Every Connection Is Actually Doing
October 20–23
PostgreSQL has traditionally offered cluster-wide or database-wide statistics. But when you have hundreds of connections and something goes sideways due to excessive I/O, WAL generation, or lock contention, the question is always: which backend? Answering that has meant polling pg_stat_activity, parsing logs, or guesswork.
The new per-backend statistics infrastructure changes that. Per-backend I/O and WAL statistics are already committed, with transaction counters, relation access patterns, and lock statistics proposed. Together, they give you direct, real-time visibility into what each connection is actually doing.
We'll cover what's landed, what's coming, and the design behind it. Then in a live demo, we'll run a mixed workload and identify the misbehaving backend on the spot — no log grep, no polling loops, just direct observation.
