Why PgBouncer Is Essential for Fair PostgreSQL vs MariaDB Benchmarking

If you're benchmarking PostgreSQL against MariaDB, you're not comparing apples to apples unless you introduce PgBouncer. Here's why.

Connection Architecture

PostgreSQL spawns a full process per client connection. That means every incoming connection forks a new backend, each with its own memory map, file descriptors, and kernel overhead. On a high-core host, this model hits system limits fast—either process count or scheduler overhead.

To scale efficiently, PostgreSQL requires PgBouncer, a separate connection pooling proxy. It’s an external add-on—you have to install it, configure it, and monitor it independently.

MariaDB, by contrast, uses a thread-per-connection model natively. No add-ons, no proxies. Thread pooling is built into the server and enabled out of the box. Threads are lightweight, share memory space, and scale efficiently. With proper stack tuning, MariaDB can handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections without breaking a sweat.

PgBouncer Levels the Field

PgBouncer sits between clients and PostgreSQL, pooling backend connections and reusing them across sessions, transactions, or statements. This avoids process churn and dramatically reduces memory usage. But again, it’s an external dependency—PostgreSQL needs PgBouncer to match the native scalability that MariaDB provides without any add-ons.

Transaction ID Philosophy

PostgreSQL uses a 32-bit Transaction ID (XID) for MVCC visibility. It’s elegant, but finite—wraparound hits after ~4 billion transactions, requiring vacuuming and freezing to avoid corruption.

MariaDB uses a 64-bit internal ID, primarily for consistency and replication. No wraparound risk. No visibility tracking at the tuple level. Different philosophies, different failure modes.

Bottom Line

If you're modeling concurrency, visibility, or long-term reliability, you need PgBouncer to make PostgreSQL behave like MariaDB. But you also need to understand how each system tracks transactions—and what that means for your workload.

Tags: #PostgreSQL #MariaDB #Benchmarking #PgBouncer #MVCC #DatabaseArchitecture #Concurrency #TechLeadership #MySQL

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