Yes, except for serverless backend, you normally don't need it.
Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
11–20 of 121 posts
Re: Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
#12If you don’t use serverless but instead a few (vertically scaling) servers, and your ORM / query builder supports pooling (all node libraries I’ve used have a pooler)…
Having a setup with just a simple docker deploy, running a monolith, not using pgbouncer so you can use LISTEN/NOTIFY to implement your own job queue:
https://www.dbos.dev/blog/postgres-listen-notify-scalability
This gives me warm fuzzy feelings, also making me relatively cloud-agnostic in the process, even though devops is not my strong point.
Most projects I do don’t need something more complex or vendor locked-in than this.
Re: Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
#13I guarantee you the vast majority of RDS instances aren't using RDS Proxy. For one, it's rather expensive.
Re: Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
#14Yes. Sometimes PostgreSQL is overkill for a low traffic, simple application. PgBouncer would be even more overkill and add unnecessary complexity.
Re: Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
#15Yes. Sometimes PostgreSQL is overkill for a low traffic, simple application. PgBouncer would be even more overkill and add unnecessary complexity.
[flagged]
Re: Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
#16Yes. I've never even heard of PgBouncer.
Me too. I even opened the page and I'm not sure of what's the problem being solved.
Re: Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
#17A whole bunch of Cloudflare clients run Postgres (self hosted) without pgbouncer (they use hyperdrive).
Re: Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
#18of course, the vast, vast majority of PostgreSQL users outside of managed cloud hosting are not using pgbouncer. pgbouncer introduces complexities into the database conversation (transaction-level pooling interacting with the prepared statement cache is a long recurring nightmare for us at sqlalchemy) that often not worth the complexity for small local installations.
this article seems to be talking about commercial cloud managed PG services, which yes, those absolutely need to support connection pooling and of course they're going to use pgbouncer.
Re: Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
#19(I work on the postgres proxy layer at Neon)
PgBouncer is entirely optional and it's not always the right choice. If you have a classical app (non serverless) and you can maintain a connection pool from your app, then I recommend avoiding pgbouncer.
The benefits of pgbouncer mostly come from irregular client connections (too many, too much churn). If you don't have that problem, go direct to postgres.
I'm exploring replacing pgbouncer with an alternative (maybe home grown) at the moment. Mostly for multi-tenancy and HA reasons. Pgbouncer has been good for us, but it's limited in how we can deploy it in a multi-tenant environment.
Re: Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
#20Yes. I've never even heard of PgBouncer.
This is the first time I've heard pgbouncer mentioned in 15 years. I didn't know it was still around.