"database system is starting up": the compute is waking, retry

TL;DR

The Neon compute is waking from idle (scale to zero) or restarting. Check the compute status in the Console Branches page (Idle vs Active).

Steps

1. The Neon compute is waking from idle (scale to zero) or restarting. Postgres is not ready to accept connections yet. Agents misread this as wrong credentials or a dead database and start rotating secrets.
2. - Retry with exponential backoff and jitter; the compute is usually ready in seconds.

• Raise the client's connection timeout so the wake-up fits inside it.
• If this happens on every deploy or cron run, the workload is fighting scale to zero: extend the idle timeout or disable it for that branch.

3. Retries succeed; no credential changes were needed. If wakes are frequent enough to matter, the timeout change eliminates them.

When to use

You are seeing this: FATAL: the database system is starting up immediately on connection attempts. Use this skill when you run into ""database system is starting up": the compute is waking, retry".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

The Neon compute is waking from idle (scale to zero) or restarting.

Neon's connection error docs (verified live 2026-09-26) cover 'Couldn't connect to compute node' including cold-start timing; the latency docs describe checking compute Active/Idle status and increasing connection timeouts to accommodate cold starts.