Andres Freund

I recently analyzed the limits of connection scalability, to understand the most effective way to improve Postgres' handling of large numbers of connections, and why that is important. I concluded that the most pressing issue is snapshot scalability.

This post details the improvements I recently contributed to Postgres 14 (to be released Q3 of 2021), significantly reducing the identified snapshot scalability bottleneck.

As the explanation of the implementation details is fairly long, I thought it'd be more fun for of you if I start with the results of the work, instead of the technical details (I'm cheating, I know ;)).

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One common challenge with Postgres for those of you who manage busy Postgres databases, and those of you who foresee being in that situation, is that Postgres does not handle large numbers of connections particularly well.

While it is possible to have a few thousand established connections without running into problems, there are some real and hard-to-avoid problems.

Since joining Microsoft last year in the Azure Database for PostgreSQL team—where I work on open source Postgres—I have spent a lot of time analyzing and addressing some of the issues with connection scalability in Postgres.

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