Benchmarking PostgreSQL connection poolers: PgBouncer, PgCat and Supavisor

Giandomenico Di Salvatore

Redis

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Connecting to a PostgreSQL database for short-lived queries is resource-intensive. To address this, three popular connection poolers are compared: PgBouncer, PgCat, and Supavisor. PgBouncer, often critiqued for limited support in replica failover, has the best latency for low connection counts but is single-threaded. PgCat supports sharding, load balancing, and is multithreaded, showing superior performance in high connection counts. Supavisor, designed for cloud-native environments, handles modern connection demands but shows higher latency. Overall, PgCat delivers higher throughput and is more scalable.

Quick overview of PgBouncer, PgCat and Supavisor

Criteria for comparing PostgreSQL connection poolers