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PGBouncer: Connection Pooling for Managed PostgreSQL Databases

Katie Sedlar is a Software Engineer at Akamai.

Executive summary

PostgreSQL creates a separate back-end process for every client connection, which consumes significant memory and limits scalability under high load.

PGBouncer is a lightweight connection pooler that sits between your application and your database, enabling a large number of clients to share a smaller set of persistent back-end connections.

Akamai now supports PGBouncer connection pooling for Managed PostgreSQL databases, powered by our partnership with Aiven.

Connection pools can be created and managed through Akamai Cloud Manager or the Akamai API, with support for transaction, session, and statement pooling modes.

Enabling PGBouncer reduces connection overhead, frees up server resources for query execution and disk caching, and improves performance at scale, with no additional infrastructure to manage.

As applications scale, database connections become…