Managed Postgres connect timeout causing Machines restart loop

Questions / Help
,
1

Title: Managed Postgres connect timeout causing Machines restart loop

App: vibe-site-sell-backend
Region: ams (but machines appear in fra as well)

Problem:
My app fails to start because Postgres connection times out.
This causes Machines to repeatedly attempt startup, eventually hitting
“machines API rate limit exceeded”.

Errors:

  • server login has been failing, cached error: connect timeout
  • instance refused connection
  • machine still attempting to start
  • machines API returned: rate limit exceeded

What I tried:

  • fly postgres detach / attach
  • ensured DATABASE_URL uses *.internal hostname
  • disabled auto_stop_machines
  • min_machines_running = 1
  • app still fails during startup

Question:
Is this expected behavior when a machine is booting but DB is slow/unreachable?
Any guidance on preventing proxy retry storms or confirming DB reachability
during startup?

2

Managed Postgres does not use .internal, it uses .flycast, can you confirm it doesn’t work with flycast?

4

I re-attached database to backend through fly.io dashboard and still getting the same error. I think the problem occurs last Saturday or Sunday. But I didn’t changed anything. Seeing this in the backend logs:
07:01:13[2026-02-09 07:01:13.992] error: server login has been failing, cached error: connect timeout (server_login_retry)

  • 07:01:13error: server login has been failing, cached error: connect timeout (server_login_retry)

  • 07:01:13 at Parser.parseErrorMessage (/opt/node_modules/pg-protocol/dist/parser.js:285:98)

  • 07:01:13 at Parser.handlePacket (/opt/node_modules/pg-protocol/dist/parser.js:122:29)

  • 07:01:13 at Parser.parse (/opt/node_modules/pg-protocol/dist/parser.js:35:38)

  • 07:01:13 at TLSSocket. (/opt/node_modules/pg-protocol/dist/index.js:11:42)

  • 07:01:13 at TLSSocket.emit (node:events:518:28)

  • 07:01:13 at TLSSocket.emit (node:domain:489:12)

  • 07:01:13 at addChunk (node:internal/streams/readable:561:12)

  • 07:01:13 at readableAddChunkPushByteMode (node:internal/streams/readable:512:3)

  • 07:01:13 at Readable.push (node:internal/streams/readable:392:5)

  • 07:01:13 at TLSWrap.onStreamRead (node:internal/stream_base_commons:189:23)

  • 07:01:13[2026-02-09 07:01:13.993] info: Shutting down Strapi

  • 07:01:14[PC01] instance refused connection. is your app listening on 0.0.0.0:1337? make sure it is not only listening on 127.0.0.1 (hint: look at your startup logs, servers often print the address they are listening on)

5

Now sawing that this was an incident. Occurred since yesterday, but now it’s working again!

6

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