LWLocks

Postgres FM

Nik and Michael discuss lightweight locks in Postgres — how they differ to (heavier) locks, some occasions they can be troublesome, and some resources for working out what to do if you hit issues.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

• Wait Events of Type LWLock https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#WAIT-EVENT-LWLOCK-TABLE
• Our episode on (heavier) locks https://postgres.fm/episodes/locks
• Nik’s new marathon posts https://postgres.ai/blog/tags/postgres-marathon
• Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale (blog post by Recall ai) https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-listen-notify-does-not-scale
• Explicit Locking https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/explicit-locking.html
• pg_stat_activity https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#MONITORING-PG-STAT-ACTIVITY-VIEW
• Tuning with wait events for RDS for PostgreSQL https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/PostgreSQL.Tuning.html
• MultiXact member exhaustion incidents (blog post by Cosmo Wolfe / Metronome) https://metronome.com/blog/root-cause-analysis-postgresql-multixact-member-exhaustion-incidents-may-2025
• pg_index_pilot https://gitlab.com/postgres-ai/pg_index_pilot
• Myths and Truths about Synchronous Replication in PostgreSQL (talk by Alexander Kukushkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFn9qRGzTMc
• Postgres Indexes, Partitioning and LWLock:LockManager Scalability (blog post by Jeremy Schneider) https://ardentperf.com /2024/03/03/postgres-indexes-partitioning-and-lwlocklockmanager-scalability

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork