There are 2 configuration options that every OLTP application that uses postgres should set, in order to protect the database from high load: statement_timeout idle_in_transaction_session_timeout These can both be set by client configuration and require no special permissions to set, and are easily overridden locally for transactions that have different requirements. They can be a bit scary to retrofit to existing applications, but we can activate two postgres extensions to help us measure our queries to find safe values to set: ...