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PgDoorman: PostgreSQL Pooler
PgDoorman is a stable and good alternative to PgBouncer, Odyssey, or PgCat (based on it). It has created with the Unix philosophy in mind. Developing was focused on perfomance, efficience and reliability. Also, PgDoorman has the improved driver support for languages like Go (pgx), .NET (npgsql), and asynchronous drivers for Python and Node.js.
Why not multi-PgBouncer?
Why do we think that using multiple instances of PgBouncer is not a suitable solution? This approach has problems with reusing prepared statements and strange and inefficient control over query cancellation. Additionally, the main issue we have encountered is that the operating system distributes new clients round-robin, but each client can disconnect at any time, leading to an imbalance after prolonged use.
Why not Odyssey?
We had difficulties using NPGSQL and SCRAM, as well as with prepared_statements support.
However, the main serious problem related to data consistency and, for a long time, we were unable to solve it.
Differences from PgCat
While PgDoorman was initially based on the PgCat project, it has since evolved into a standalone solution with its own set of features. Some of the key differences include:
- Performance improvements compared to PgCat/PgBouncer/Odyssey.
- Support for extended protocol with popular programming language drivers.
- Enhanced monitoring metrics to improve visibility into database activity..
- Careful resource management to avoid memory issues (
max_memory_usage,message_size_to_be_stream). - SCRAM client/server authentication support.
- Gracefully binary upgrade.
- Supporting JWT for service-to-database authentication.
- Many micro-optimizations (for example, the time spent with the client is longer than the server's busy time).