Mythvex
Independent coverage of infrastructure, networking and data practice.
Practical Notes on Postgres Connection Pooling
August 29, 2026
Handling PostgreSQL backends imposes substantial overhead because each active client spawns a dedicated process consuming significant RAM, making intermediary connection management mandatory at scale. While session-level pooling preserves compatibility seamlessly, transaction pooling aggressively reassigns connections between queries, breaking features like LISTEN channels, advisory locks, and runtime configuration parameters.
Operational headaches with connection proxies usually stem from poor connection hygiene: forgotten checkouts left dangling in application code, cursors maintained across idle sleep loops, and large migrations hogging pooled slots. Enforcing transaction pooling surfaces these bad patterns immediately by terminating unsupported stateful operations.
Data Residency Basics for Global Teams
June 15, 2026
Data residency questions arrive late in most projects, usually phrased as: can you just keep EU customer data in the EU? The honest answer is that 'just' is doing enormous work in that sentence, because residency is not a hosting decision but an architecture decision.…
HTTP/3 and QUIC: What Changed for Operators
June 18, 2026
QUIC moves the transport into userspace and encrypts most of the header, which is lovely for privacy and mildly annoying for anyone debugging with tcpdump. Flow control and congestion data that used to be visible on the wire now live behind the TLS key log.…
Email Deliverability: Authentication Beyond SPF
April 18, 2026
Relying strictly on SPF validation is long obsolete. Outbound mail can easily pass envelope checks while failing domain alignment, prompting modern receiving systems to evaluate cryptographic DKIM signatures and strict DMARC enforcement instead.…
Understanding TLS 1.3 Session Resumption
September 8, 2026
While TLS 1.3 reduced initial connection setup to one round trip, reconnecting clients achieve their largest performance gains through session resumption. Supplying an established pre-shared key allows traffic to bypass negotiation and transmit payload immediately, transforming mobile load times fro…
More reading
- Cache Invalidation Patterns That Survive Traffic — Data, May 27, 2026
- What Good Observability Actually Looks Like — Operations, May 7, 2026
- Managing Secrets Without Losing Sleep — Security, August 17, 2026
About us
Our contributors have spent years on-call for large platforms. This site collects the playbooks, postmortems and reference material we wish someone had handed us earlier.