[pdeva1]

seems like yugabyte, like postgres, also spawns a process per connection; thus requiring use of external connection pool

[rkarthik007]

Very astute observation! Two things:

* We implemented a feature to share memory between these connection handling processes so that makes it a bit more efficient

* Longer term we are thinking of switching to a thread based model. This is how our other API YCQL works.

(cto / co-founder)

[ralusek]

I think this is a very important thing to prioritize for a DB of this nature. Postgres/RDBMS connections in general are an extreme weak spot for containerized/serverless applications.

DynamoDB/ElasticSearch's approach of not needing to establish/maintain a connection seems like the ideal solution. I think for applications that would utilize your DB, a minor hit to the speed of an individual request is well worth it as compared to being able to scale up the amount of simultaneous requests.

[rkarthik007]

Yes absolutely spot on!

Peeling the onion one more layer, there are two underlying features that are required:

1) Move to a threaded model to be able to scale instantaneously. This is already the case with YCQL, we're planning on doing this for YSQL.

2) There needs to be a change to the client drivers in order to become smarter to deal with how the app connects to the DB. In fact, we're working on enabling this for the Spring (Java) ecosystem by enhancing the JDSB driver (still in the early stages): https://github.com/YugaByte/ybjdbc

(cto/co-founder)

[pdeva1]

what does the JDBC driver has to do with thread per connection in the database? jdbc doesnt care if you use threads or processes for the connection

[rkarthik007]

True for a single node. However, there will be multiple IP address/connections anyway, since YugaByte DB is a distributed DB and it runs across multiple nodes. JDBC drivers connect to only one node - so to provide true connection scaling, the client side would need to become aware of a multi-node cluster and do connection pooling across these. Of course there are other issues also that need to get solved that are slightly related:

* The node given to the JDBC driver could be down, or nodes could get added/removed over time. This makes "discovery of nodes" a problem.

* We could use a random round robin strategy to connect to nodes - where client connects to a random cluster node which internally connects to the appropriate node. This would result in an increased latency, and also an increase in the net number of connections needed.

These may not matter if the load balancer is smart like in the case of Kubernetes (and where the extra hop becomes mandatory as well). But for non-k8s deployments, these help.

[Maledictus]

Would async/event based work? Of course with at least one thread per core.

[rkarthik007]

We are working with the R2DBC folks on reactive programming for async/event based use cases as well. This work is just getting kicked off. If interesting, please join our community Slack and give us any feedback/thoughts.