We are excited to announce that we are moving Connection Pooling for Heroku Postgres into GA. Connection Pooling unlocks the ability to use up to 10,000 client connections to a Heroku Postgres Database, without adversely impacting performance on the database. This will unlock more complex and higher scale applications with simpler architectures on the Heroku Platform.
Over the years, one of the factors that you have to consider when scaling applications is pressure on the database. Each connection to the database consumes resources that could be spent on processing requests. The balancing of resources spent on connections and processing is a delicate one that Heroku Engineering has had years of experience with. However, applications keep growing in complexity, with patterns like microservices and pure scale pushing the limits.
Getting Started
Connection Pooling is a managed version of PgBouncer on the database server, which maintains its own connection pool. PgBouncer directs queries to already open database connections, reducing the frequency with which new processes are created on your database server.
It’s as easy as heroku pg:connection-pooling:attach to set up Connection Pooling for Heroku Postgres. See the documentation for more detail.
Feedback Welcome
Connection Pooling opens new abilities to leverage Heroku Postgres at scale, and in more complex architectures.