[Pgpool-general] A newbie question about pgpool

[Arnau]

Hi all,

   This is my first post to the list :)

   I just installed pgpool in my debian box and I have been reading the
documentation at pgpool's home page and the archives of this list.

   What I'm searching is a middleware that optimizes the connections of
my applications with the DB. My applicacions are web based and they
open/close a lot of connections and I can't use persistent connections.
So, I'd like to have something that have some already opened connections
with the DB and as new connections are requested from the applications
this middleware reuses the connections it handles.

   I'm a bit confused about what pgpool provides, In the homepage you
can read:

"pgpool caches the connection to PostgreSQL server to reduce the
overhead to establish the connection to it"

  and also:

"overhead: Any access to PostgreSQL must go through pgpool, which means
some overhead is added to each database access. In my testing using
pgbench shows 1 to 15% performance penalty. This number may vary for
each testing environment though."

   In a discussion thread called "[Pgpool-general] Several questions
about pgpool" in the August 2006 archives, Tatsuo Ishii says "pgpool
doesn't try to reuse an already connection".

   Then, what I have understood is pgpool works fine for replication and
load balancing, but it's not performance oriented.

   Am I wrong? and I apologize in advance if I have done a BIG mistake :)
-- 
Arnau