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Yes, you have a pool, but it’s handled by PDO somewhere, and I have no idea how to manipulate it. It just occured to me to try to open another resource before deallocating the first one.
If that doesn’t work, I will give PgBouncer a try. In case that won’t do what I need, I’ll just use pg_pconnect.
I love PHP so much, this is one of two issues I have with it.
You can check with is_resource maybe?
With the single process, you can cache queries in memory depending on how the data change for example and the frequency they have.
The manual https://www.php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php
Has some interesting notes and also
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.pg-connect.php
Mentions a force_new kind of setting if you need. I think not PDO but the constant you might be able to pass.
Also SO has some stuff users say
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3332074/what-are-the-disadvantages-of-using-persistent-connection-in-pdo
Personally, I don’t try to optimize so hard in PHP (5 to 10ms due to db connection). There is always an improvement on the way things work, like how the code works that would probably give you a magnitude of performance. Just saying!
So I finally found the time, and also my issue - it was a PEBKAC all along.
My retry loop was written so haphazardly, that it was stuck in an infinite loop after experiencing rebalancing, instead of correcting it.
After fixing that, it all works as expected. There was no issue with persistent connections after all. Rebalancing halts the benchmark for 3 seconds, then traffic re-routes itself to the correct node.
The current set-up is three node cluster Postgres + PHP, with HAProxy routing the pg connects to the writeable node, and one nginx load balancer/reverse proxy. I tried PgBouncer with and without persistent PHP connects, and it made little to no measurable difference.
The whole deal is a Proof of Concept for replacing current production project, that is written in Perl+MySQL (PXC). And I dislike both with such burning passion, that I’m willing to use my free time to replace both.
And from my tests it seems that Patroni cluster can fully replace the multi-master cluster with auto-failover, and we can do switch-over without losing a single request.
Glad to hear it. All of it actually. Sounds you are content with it now.
Had to Google PEBKAC. Aren’t all problems like that?
That’s more of a philosophical question.
My only current issue with PHP is resource handling, and the lack of ability to share sockets between threads/fibers. Erlang actually does this so well, it’s a shame that language isn’t more used, and so managers are afraid of it.
Back to the question: is the resource sharing an issue with PHP, or is it my PEBKAC that I’m trying to bend PHP to something it wasn’t designed for?
At a first level it certainly is an issue with PHP, but PHP was also designed by a human. That design comes with its own problems right? I guess what I said is just a generalisation of PEBKAC as all (mostly all) software is designed by some human. Fact that it’s a different chair may as well be considered not a PEBKAC ? Yes it’s philosophical or simply which perspective you choose to see.
Haven’t played with amphp/parallel but maybe worth a look to see how/if sockets are shared there.
Yeah, for a PHP socket server, the best route would be going React/Amp route, as building a custom event loop is a big undertaking, and anyone will shoot themselves in the foot or worse.
Since they are single process loops, you don’t need to ‘share’ them, as they all belong to the only process. But that does limit you to a single process.
The issue is that the PDO returns a resource, but for a connection, that is no longer writeable.
I did not have time to actually test anything, and I won’t till sunday at least.
Just so you get my situation:
I need to benchmark 5000 successful write requests per second. So yes, 5ms is way too long for me, the rest of the request is done within 3ms tops.
I beat that benchmark with ease, the only issue is with the failover in Patroni cluster. Once I get some time to sit down, I will report my findings.
There are many other ways to solve this, I just want to better understand what PDO actually does.
I would read the c source if I were you. I’ve done that to learn more in the past in other occasions.
Makes sense to want to optimize it yes as just connecting is more than anything else. What PHP version btw?