In a quest for better performance with postgres, I’ve been looking for connection pooling tools. There are a few quirks that I tend to require be met. First, it must run on Solaris. This isn’t so much a quirk, since the server runs Solaris and is SPARC hardware, and I’m not going to install a second server in colo just to accomodate software that doesn’t work on Solaris/SPARC. Additionally, I refuse to install GCC, so it must build with Sun Studio, which is much more GCC compatible that it used to be, but still isn’t GCC. Also, I want it to be reasonably simple to install and setup. I am willing to consider prebuilt packages from sunfreeware. If I get desperate enough, maybe even blastwave. Unfortunately, none of the top choices appear to be on sunfreeware.

The top choices appear to be:

• pgpool

This is the classic choice, building and install is easy, but setup is very arcane.

• pgbouncer

This looks like it should be simple to install and setup, but the configure script refuses to find my libevent install.

• SQLRelay

Works for many databases, unlike the others, including sqlite. However, it requires the rudiments library from the same author, and this library won’t build because the autoconf stuff doesn’t understand anything but GCC.

So, I haven’t broken down to checking out blastwave yet, but so far none of the normal choices are working out for PostgreSQL connection pooling.

Then, I made a small breakthrough when I found that PHP has pg_pconnect. pg_pconnect does some background bookeeping to keep connections open after you call pg_close, and return the same connection if the arguments are the same. Practically, this means that if you use a PHP system that keeps persistant php interpreters (say, mod_php in Apache, which is what I use for PHP), then you have effectively gotten connection pooling for PHP only.

This is a big help already, but I still need a solution that helps out with python.

Yes, I am working on a little web development on vacation.