mysql - What is the best solution for database connection pooling in python?

Question

I have developed some custom DAO-like classes to meet some very specialized requirements for my project that is a server-side process that does not run inside any kind of framework.

The solution works great except that every time a new request is made, I open a new connection via MySQLdb.connect.

What is the best "drop in" solution to switch this over to using connection pooling in python? I am imagining something like the commons DBCP solution for Java.

The process is long running and has many threads that need to make requests, but not all at the same time... specifically they do quite a lot of work before brief bursts of writing out a chunk of their results.

Edited to add: After some more searching I found anitpool.py which looks decent, but as I'm relatively new to python I guess I just want to make sure I'm not missing a more obvious/more idiomatic/better solution.

Answer 1

In MySQL?

I'd say don't bother with the connection pooling. They're often a source of trouble and with MySQL they're not going to bring you the performance advantage you're hoping for. This road may be a lot of effort to follow--politically--because there's so much best practices hand waving and textbook verbiage in this space about the advantages of connection pooling.

Connection pools are simply a bridge between the post-web era of stateless applications (e.g. HTTP protocol) and the pre-web era of stateful long-lived batch processing applications. Since connections were very expensive in pre-web databases (since no one used to care too much about how long a connection took to establish), post-web applications devised this connection pool scheme so that every hit didn't incur this huge processing overhead on the RDBMS.

Since MySQL is more of a web-era RDBMS, connections are extremely lightweight and fast. I have written many high volume web applications that don't use a connection pool at all for MySQL.

This is a complication you may benefit from doing without, so long as there isn't a political obstacle to overcome.