Notes on Small Systems.

Databases, backups, and keeping modest servers alive. Updated when something is worth writing down, which is less often than I intend.


  1. The restore drill nobody runs

    A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis. Here is the forty-minute exercise I now run every quarter, and the three things it caught the first time.

  2. Why my Postgres connection pool was the wrong size for two years

    More connections did not mean more throughput. The fix was smaller numbers in two places and one line of documentation explaining why.

  3. Log rotation is not optional

    A short post about the evening I spent recovering a server whose disk had quietly filled with container logs, and the four lines that prevent it.

Older posts are still being moved over from the previous setup. They will reappear here as I get to them; nothing has been deleted.