ERROR: could not access status of transaction (SQLSTATE 58P01) when calling listen

Question

My application listens on a channel on startup. After running the database and application for a while, if I restart the application, I get this error attempting to listen on the channel:

ERROR: could not access status of transaction 145358605 (SQLSTATE 58P01)

I cannot recover from this error even if I restart the app multiple times. I have to restart the database and then the application.

I'm not doing pg_notify on this channel while the app is restarting. Other sessions are inserting into the database, but they don't trigger anything that could cause the pg_notify on this channel.

This problem only recently started happening when we upgraded to Postgres 16.0. We were previously using 10.5

I stopped all my processes that inserted into any tables, but I still get the error when the app attempts to start. I see this from @Laurenz Albe's query. It seems like the only transaction is the query itself:

# SELECT query, max(clock_timestamp() - xact_start) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE backend_type = 'client backend' group by query;
                                                             query                                                             |       max
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------
 SELECT query, max(clock_timestamp() - xact_start) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE backend_type = 'client backend' group by query; | 00:00:00.009886
(1 row)

# SELECT query, max(clock_timestamp() - xact_start) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE backend_type = 'client backend' group by query;
                                                             query                                                             |       max
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------
 ;                                                                                                                             |
 SELECT query, max(clock_timestamp() - xact_start) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE backend_type = 'client backend' group by query; | 00:00:00.001153
(2 rows)

# SELECT query, max(clock_timestamp() - xact_start) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE backend_type = 'client backend' group by query;
                                                             query                                                             |      max
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------
 SELECT query, max(clock_timestamp() - xact_start) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE backend_type = 'client backend' group by query; | 00:00:00.00106
(1 row)