Re: Monitoring number of backends

* John R Pierce (pierce(at)hogranch(dot)com) wrote:
> On 10/22/2013 1:13 PM, andy wrote:
> >No, actually, I don't think my connect overhead is huge. My
> >apache and postgres are on the same box, and it connects using
> >unix socket. Perhaps if my apache on db were on different boxes it
> >would be a problem.
>
> each postgres connection, if you're not using a pool, requires a
> fork() of the postgres process. fork is inherently an expensive
> process, especially for a moderately large and fairly complex piece
> of software like postgresql.

As Tom points out, it's really PG that makes the new connections slow;
fork(), while it can be slow on some platforms, really is small potatos
compared to PG opening a database, populating caches, etc.

Thanks,

Stephen