Re: recommendations for web/db connection pooling or DBD::Gofer reviews

> When traffic to our PostgreSQL-backed website spikes, the first resource
> we see being exhausted is the DB slots on the master server (currently
> set to about 400).
>
> I expect that as new Apache/mod_perl children are being put to us, they
> are creating new database connections.
>
> I'm interested in recommendations to funnel more of that traffic through
> fewer DB slots, if that's possible. (We could also consider increasing
> the handles available, since the DB server has some CPU and memory to
> spare).
>
> I'm particularly interested in review of DBD::Gofer, which seems like it
> would help with this in our Perl application:
> http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBI/lib/DBD/Gofer.pm
>
> I realize it has limitations, like "no transactions", but I think we
> would still able to use it selectively in our application.

Under heavy load, Apache has the usual failure mode of spawning so many
threads/processes and database connections that it just exhausts all the
memory on the webserver and also kills the database.
As usual, I would use lighttpd as a frontend (also serving static files)
to handle the large number of concurrent connections to clients, and then
have it funnel this to a reasonable number of perl backends, something
like 10-30. I don't know if fastcgi works with perl, but with PHP it
certainly works very well. If you can't use fastcgi, use lighttpd as a
HTTP proxy and apache with mod_perl behind.
Recipe for good handling of heavy load is using an asynchronous server
(which by design can handle any number of concurrent connections up to the
OS' limit) in front of a small number of dynamic webpage generating
threads/processes.