Executive TL;DR

• PgBouncer can be scaled to 4x throughput with proper configuration
• Using multiple PgBouncer instances with HAProxy can be beneficial
• Scaling PgBouncer can be straightforward with Kubernetes

The Buzz Score

The Internet’s Verdict: 70% Hyped, 30% Skeptical

Forum Voices

Users have reported success with scaling PgBouncer to 4x throughput. One user noted:

Interesting. We run pgbouncer via kubernetes so it was straightforward to make multiple pgbouncer processes on one machine. Also straightforward to get them running on multiple machines, which helps because we run on Azure and they like to cause rolling outages across our fleet via VM maintenance…

Another user asked about the disadvantages of using HAProxy with multiple PgBouncer instances:

Was there a disadvantage to using HAProxy + multiple PGBouncer instances?

A third user shared their experience with scaling PgBouncer for a different application:

This was more for fun than real use, but I greatly enjoyed hacking something similar into rqbit bittorrent client.
I wanted to run an instance of ‘rqbit download’ per torrent via so_reuseport. When a peer tries to connect, it gets sent to a random instance. So I built a whole rendezvous system, where instances find each other & either proxy data to each other or fd pass the socket to each other directly to get the peer socket to the instance that needs it. It uses postcard rpc to chat between instances.

Configuration

One user shared their PgBouncer configuration:

Article should show the config: [pgbouncer]
listen_addr = 0.0.0.0
listen_port = 6432
so_reuseport = 1
peer_id = 1
unix_socket_dir = /tmp/pgbouncer1
[peers]
1 = host=/tmp/pgbouncer1
2 = host=/tmp/pgbouncer2
3 = host=/tmp/pgbouncer3
4 = host=/tmp/pgbouncer4

Focus Keyword: PgBouncer Scaling