Rory, this is about established connections, not new connections - psycopg2 already offers a connection timeout, but that is a different thing. I don't want to drift too far off topic - but we are already using pgbouncer, and the problem isn't detected by it, either. I'm not a developer but I believe the problem is the generic nature of some blocking socket calls, which may hang under some odd circumstances, and they remain hanging until some odd ssl timeout is reached (15 minutes+ which is a very long time for any application to be hanging in limbo, but more so for our own monitoring tools which are written in Python).
Having the client provide general handling for in-flight timeouts would be the overall best solution imho.
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