Problems with Postgres starter tier

Question

I recently moved to Postgres and am getting intermittent errors of the form:

PGError: FATAL:  terminating connection due to administrator command
SSL connection has been closed unexpectedly: 
        SELECT a.attname, format_type(a.atttypid, a.atttypmod), 
               d.adsrc, a.attnotnull
          FROM pg_attribute a LEFT JOIN pg_attrdef d
            ON a.attrelid = d.adrelid AND a.attnum = d.adnum
         WHERE a.attrelid = '"xxxxxx"'::regclass
           AND a.attnum > 0 AND NOT a.attisdropped
         ORDER BY a.attnum

vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/activerecord-3.0.11/lib/active_record/
connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb:505:in `exec'

What can I do to get around this (apart from going back to the old Postgres Addon, which is a temporary solution I suppose).

Answer 1

Ideally your app should be transparently coping with database errors by re-trying its work without bugging the user. If an idle DB backend is shut down from under it, it shouldn't care, it should just make a new connection and start the transaction again. I don't know how practical Rails and ActiveRecord makes that though.

See also the question What's the cause of "PGError: FATAL: terminating connection due to administrator command" on heroku?.

It seems that Heroku will kill sometimes backends and restart servers when they're doing maintenance, which might explain your issues if your use is very infrequent.