How to see running queries in Postgres and kill them

Something is slow. Maybe a page takes forever to load, maybe a migration is hanging, maybe your Supabase dashboard just spins. You suspect a query is stuck somewhere in your database, but you can't see what's happening — Postgres doesn't exactly surface this on its own. Turns out it does. You just need to ask. Seeing what's running Postgres keeps track of every active connection and what it's doing in a system view called pg_stat_activity . You can query it like any table: SELECT pid , state , query , age ( clock_timestamp (), query_start ) AS duration FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE state != 'idle' ORDER BY duration DESC ; That gives you every non-idle process — its process ID, current state, the SQL it's running, and how long it's been at it. If something has been running for minutes when it should take milliseconds, you've found your problem. A few things worth knowing about the columns: pid — the process ID, which you'll need if you want to kill it state — usually active (running right now), idle in transaction (sitting inside an open transaction doing nothing), or idle (waiting for work) query — the actual SQL text query_start — when the current query began If you want to include the user and database to narrow things down: SELECT pid , usename , datname , state , query , age ( clock_timestamp (), query_start ) AS duration FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE state != 'idle' ORDER BY duration DESC ; The dangerous one — idle in transaction An active query that's been running for a while is usually just slow. An idle in transaction connection is a different kind of problem — it means someone (or some code) opened a transaction and never committed or rolled it back. The connection is doing nothing, but it's still holding locks, which can block other queries from running. These are the ones that tend to cause cascading slowdowns. If you see one that's been sitting there for longer than expected, it's almost certainly a bug in application code — a missing COMMIT , an unhandled e