A connection pooler is a software component that manages database connections. This can help in multiple ways to improve resource utilization, help with load balancing or failover, and can greatly reduce transaction times. In this blog post, we’re going to see what a connection pooler is and how to configure it.

What a Connection Pooler Is and Why It’s Useful

Opening a connection to the database takes many steps. We need to connect to the server and perform the initial handshake, agree on the encryption and connection settings, and then keep the new connection resource across all the layers (network driver, OS layer, database layer, etc.). Each connection consumes memory which size depends on the database engine. For PostgreSQL, this can be even 1.3MB of memory for one connection. Opening a connection also takes time as we need to negotiate the settings of the new connection.