#2100·pgx

dangling transactions after 'failed to deallocate cached statement' errors

Author: ValodimCreated Aug 1, 2024Updated May 26, 2026
Labelsbug

Hey there. First of all, thank you for all your work on this library :+1:

Describe the bug

We are using pgx in a fairly typical backend application, that serves requests to clients via grpc. We use pgx as a driver via sqlx. Starting with version 5.5.4, we started to notice some problems:

  • Our production logs contained lines "failed to deallocate cached statement: conn closed". Roughly it was a couple hundred times a day, for a couple hundred thousand requests a day where each request is a transaction.
  • This happened predominantly (but not exclusively) in streaming requests. Those are ended when cancelled by the user, so we assume it's some race condition around cancelled context behavior.
  • The logged error happens from a call to tx.Rollback(), which is called from a defer that is set up with the transaction and run at the end of the cancelled rpc method.
  • We also started to see dangling transactions left in an idle in transaction state, indefinitely (hours), causing issues particularly when they held on to locks. While this is not definitely related to the log entries, it started happening at the same time and the log entries indicate an error during transaction cleanup.

It seems like something goes wrong around transaction cleanup, but we can't tell what's going on at all.

To Reproduce

Unfortunately, we were unable to reproduce this bug outside our production environment, which also isn't source available. :( Rolling back to 5.5.3 "fixed" the issue for us, so it might be caused by 046f497efb4e92caa9575a0e9c351e4906af14c6. We tried some things in our codebase around transaction behavior and made sure we begin/end transactions consistently throughout, to no avail. If you have any ideas, we'd be happy to try.

Version

  • Go: $ go version -> go version go1.21.5 linux/amd64
  • PostgreSQL: $ psql --no-psqlrc --tuples-only -c 'select version()' -> PostgreSQL 15.7 on x86_64-pc-linux-musl, compiled by gcc (Alpine 13.2.1_git20240309) 13.2.1 20240309, 64-bit
  • pgx: $ grep 'github.com/jackc/pgx/v[0-9]' go.mod -> v5.5.4