pg_wait_tracer

From Postgres FM by Nikolay Samokhvalov and Michael Christofides

April 24, 2026 · 44 min · Episode 178

About this episode

Nik and Michael discuss pg_wait_tracer with guest Dmitry Fomin, exploring wait event tracing and its implications for PostgreSQL.

Nik and Michael are joined by Dmitry Fomin to discuss his new tool pg_wait_tracer, as well as changes that could be made to core to allow wait event tracing with lower overhead, and on managed services. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Dmitry Fomin https://postgres.fm/people/dmitry-fomin pg_wait_tracer https://github.com/DmitryNFomin/pg_wait_tracer pg_wait_sampling https://github.com/postgrespro/pg_wait_sampling pg_10046 https://github.com/DmitryNFomin/pg_10046 Jeremy Schneider reply on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7414966981847748608 RDS for PostgreSQL wait event docs https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/PostgreSQL.Tuning.concepts.summary.html Custom wait events for extensions (added in PostgreSQL 17) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xfunc-c.html#XFUNC-ADDIN-WAIT-EVENTS Hacking Postgres with Dmitry, Kirk, and Nik (Part 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gtuc2lnnsE Hacking Postgres with Dmitry, Kirk, and Nik (Part 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kqpjnpl5Gc Tanel Poder https://tanelpoder.com/about/ USDT static tracepoints for wait event tracing (proof of concept by Nik)…

People in this episode

Hosts: Nikolay Samokhvalov, Michael Christofides

Guest: Dmitry Fomin

Topics covered

wait event tracing
PostgreSQL tools
managed services
performance analysis
overhead reduction

Keywords

pg_wait_tracer
wait events
PostgreSQL
performance
overhead
managed services
tracing tools

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: pg_wait_tracer, PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS, pg_wait_sampling, pg_10046