25 Jun, 2009
PHP’s pg_connect via pgpool-II vs pgBouncer vs native
Posted by: Enrico Stahn In: System Administration
In the last few weeks one of our customer had some performance issues with our web application. We discovered a lot of opportunities in our infrastructure that would improve the performance. I’m currently working on an article series about those experiences.
Whatever, if you’re running a high-traffic PHP application with a PostgreSQL database as backend you might be running into problems with slow repsonse times of your pages caused by pg_connect. This was one of the things happens to our application.
To solve this issue you can use a connection pooling software like pgpool-II or pgBouncer. I’m not going to explain what this makes or show how this works in theory. I just give you some statistics fresh from one of our servers to think about it.
The webserver is running on Apache 2 + fcgid + PHP (CGI). This explains why the first benchmark results are low and increasing by and by.
1) PHP file without a database connection
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart ; for c in {1..10}; do ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://localhost/phpinfo.php 2>&1 | grep "Requests per second"; done
Restarting web server: apache2 ... waiting ..
Requests per second: 55.04 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 117.04 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 108.67 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 99.30 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 114.79 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 155.76 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 152.06 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 142.65 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 154.77 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 149.60 [#/sec] (mean)
2) PHP file with pg_connect to PostgreSQL
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart ; for c in {1..10}; do ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://localhost/phpinfo2.php 2>&1 | grep "Requests per second"; done
Restarting web server: apache2 ... waiting ..
Requests per second: 8.50 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 12.47 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 12.14 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 12.50 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 12.50 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 12.39 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 12.38 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 12.34 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 12.01 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 11.91 [#/sec] (mean)
3) PHP file with pg_connect via pgpool-II
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart ; for c in {1..10}; do ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://localhost/phpinfo3.php 2>&1 | grep "Requests per second"; done
Restarting web server: apache2 ... waiting ...
Requests per second: 41.43 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 94.64 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 80.83 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 85.47 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 73.03 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 87.65 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 84.18 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 103.66 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 105.99 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 104.72 [#/sec] (mean)
4) PHP file with pg_connect via pgBouncer
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart ; for c in {1..10}; do ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://localhost/phpinfo4.php 2>&1 | grep "Requests per second"; done
Restarting web server: apache2 ... waiting ...
Requests per second: 47.53 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 106.67 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 90.49 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 66.29 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 102.98 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 129.06 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 115.56 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 132.95 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 127.06 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second: 126.64 [#/sec] (mean)
What are your experiences and which one do you prefer? Why do you prefer pgpool-II over pgBouncer or pgBouncer over pgpool-II?
