Async client libraries - not worth it?

Hi,

I’m writing a new web app, and I’ve been experimenting with some async DB access libraries [1]. I also see some discussion online about a future Java standard to replace or supplement JDBC with an async API.

While I understand the benefits of async in some situations, it seems to me that these libraries are not going to give much performance benefit, given the architecture of a PostgreSQL server. (Nothing against PG; probably most RDBMSs are like this.)

I wonder if anyone else has looked at this and agrees, or not. ?

A client library with an async-style API may allow 100,000s of concurrent “operations”, but since the PG server itself doesn’t handle connections on that scale (and has no plans to, I assume?), the client library is really maintaining a queue of operations waiting for a connection pool. Maybe there is some performance benefit there, but the most important point - to free up the front end to handle many HTTP connections - can also happen by combining an operation queue with a synchronous API.

Rob

[1]: Mentioned here: https://github.com/pgjdbc/pgadba/issues/17