[hn_throwaway_99]

Short of it is that Postgres uses a process per connection, so architectures that spin up and close connections frequently can have serious scalability issues.

Note the landing page for the AWS RDS Proxy, https://aws.amazon.com/rds/proxy/ , is as good a discussion as any as to why you'd want to put a pooling proxy in front of Postgres.

[staticassertion]

You're grey'd out, but based on some quick research this appears correct.

> PostgreSQL is implemented using a simple "process per user" client/server model. In this model there is one client process connected to exactly one server process. As we do not know ahead of time how many connections will be made, we have to use a master process that spawns a new server process every time a connection is requested. This master process is called postgres and listens at a specified TCP/IP port for incoming connections. Whenever a request for a connection is detected the postgres process spawns a new server process. The server tasks communicate with each other using semaphores and shared memory to ensure data integrity throughout concurrent data access.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/connect-estab.html

[bradknowles]

So, we tried AWS RDS Proxy for MySQL (well, actually AWS RDS Aurora MySQL), and we found that it did not improve our situation at all. It added latency, but no additional performance, and memory usage was unchanged.

The applications already had their own connection pooling functionality built-in, so AWS RDS Proxy didn’t buy us anything more beyond that.

I can’t speak for what this technology can do for situations where your application code does not already have connection pooling, or for cases regarding RDS Postgres.