Hi,

I am facing a critical issue with my production app where the backend becomes unresponsive after a period of time, requiring a manual redeploy to fix.

The Stack:

• Frontend: Next.js

• Backend: Python

• Database: Postgres

The Symptoms:

• The app (summachat.com) works fine after a fresh deploy.

• After some time (hours/days), the frontend gets stuck on a loading state.

• The backend service shows as "Online" in the Railway dashboard (no crash reported).

• The Fix: If I manually redeploy the exact same backend commit, the app immediately starts working again.

Project ID:5f090606-c2e6-456d-b71e-9fd698cf176b,

Could someone please check the service metrics/health to see why it hangs without crashing?

Thanks!

Are you using serverless?

No, the app runs as containerized services on Railway (Next.js frontend + FastAPI backend). They’re long-running processes, not serverless functions.

Not a serverless function.

I meant this:

no its not serverless

Thank you so much for the detailed breakdown, this was incredibly helpful!

I've implemented all of your suggestions:

1. Health check — Updated my /health endpoint to actually test DB connectivity with SELECT 1 instead of just returning {"status": "ok"}. Configured it as the healthcheck path in Railway.

1. Gunicorn with async workers — Switched from raw uvicorn to gunicorn -w 4 -k uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker --timeout 90. The worker timeout alone should prevent the silent hang, if a worker gets stuck, gunicorn will kill and restart it automatically.

1. Connection pool tuning — Reduced from pool_size=50 + max_overflow=50 (100 total) down to pool_size=5 + max_overflow=10 per worker. With 4 gunicorn workers, the old config could have opened up to 400 connections against Railway Postgres — almost certainly the root cause of the exhaustion.

1. Pool recycle — Reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes since Railway Postgres can drop idle connections sooner.

Deploying to staging first to validate, then rolling out to production. Really appreciate the thorough response, saved me a lot of debugging time!