[ngbronson]

When the pool was originally coded, MySQL had one thread per open connection. That made the auto-sizing MRU pool a pretty big win, because it kept the connection counts as low as possible while using the warmest database threads. MySQL has matured since then, so this optimization is no longer important.

Out-of-order delivery causes TCP to shrink the congestion windows, which cuts throughput. Connection pools help here (in addition to their reduction in setup and teardown work), because they let the windows widen and stay open. We disable tcp_slow_start_after_idle to take advantage of this.