Postgres FM | MultiXact member space exhaustion

July 18, 2025 • 56 Minutes

MultiXact member space exhaustion

Nikolay and Michael are joined by Andrew Johnson and Nate Brennand from Metronome to discuss MultiXact member space exhaustion — what it is, how they managed to hit it, and some tips to prevent running into it at scale.

Here are some links to things they mentioned:

Nate Brennand https://postgres.fm/people/nate-brennand
Andrew Johnson https://postgres.fm/people/andrew-johnson
Metronome https://metronome.com
Root Cause Analysis: PostgreSQL MultiXact member exhaustion incidents (blog post by Metronome) https://metronome.com/blog/root-cause-analysis-postgresql-multixact-member-exhaustion-incidents-may-2025
Multixacts and Wraparound (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/routine-vacuuming.html#VACUUM-FOR-MULTIXACT-WRAPAROUND
multixact.c source code https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend/access/transam/multixact.c
Add pg_stat_multixact view for multixact membership usage monitoring (patch proposal by Andrew, needing review!) https://commitfest.postgresql.org/patch/5869/
PostgreSQL subtransactions considered harmful (blog post by Nikolay) https://postgres.ai/blog/20210831-postgresql-subtransactions-considered-harmful
vacuum_multixact_failsafe_age doesn't account for MultiXact member exhaustion (thread started by Peter Geoghegan) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAH2-WzmLPWJk3gbAxy8dHY%2BA-Juz_6uGwfe6DkE8B5-dTDvLcw%40mail.gmail.com
Amazon S3 Vectors https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-s3-vectors-first-cloud-storage-with-native-vector-support-at-scale/
MultiXacts in PostgreSQL: usage, side effects, and monitoring (blog post by Shawn McCoy and Divya Sharma from AWS) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/multixacts-in-postgresql-usage-side-effects-and-monitoring/
Postgres Aurora multixact monitoring queries https://gist.github.com/natebrennand/0924f723ff61fa897c4106379fc7f3dc
And finally an apology and a correction, the membership space is ~4B, not ~2B as said by Michael in the episode! Definition here:
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/f6ffbeda00e08c4c8ac8cf72173f84157491bfde/src/include/access/multixact.h#L31

And here's the formula discussed for calculating how the member space can grow quadratically by the number of overlapping transactions:

Members can be calculated via: aₙ = 2 + [sum from k=3 to n+1 of k]
This simplifies to: aₙ = (((n+1)(n+2))/2) - 1

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