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PGSimCity (surfaced via r/programming, 290 upvotes; Hacker News, 888 points)

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2026-07-27

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2026-07-27 / REDDITPGSimCity Renders Postgres Internals as an Explorable 3D City — shared_buffers as a Plaza of 1,024 Page FramesNikolay Samokhvalov's PGSimCity hit 290 upvotes on r/programming and 888 points on Hacker News. It maps Postgres internals onto city geography: the central plaza is shared_buffers rendered as 1,024 page frames whose height is clock-sweep usage count and whose color is true buffer state, an amber district to the east is the write-ahead log, the pit below is the data directory with heap files that visibly grow as you bloat them, and a standby to the south replays what the primary sends it, always slightly behind. The author is explicit that it is a hand-written model, not an emulator — no Postgres source runs, and numbers are scaled to human-watchable speeds — built for engineers who are good at their jobs but have never had to operate a database and need to see why a checkpoint spikes latency or what synchronous_commit actually charges.

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