Assistance with Prisma Connection Pooling and Database Load Average Issues

Hey there! 👋

For DigitalOcean Managed Databases, you could actually handled your connection pooling on the database level directly. Since DigitalOcean provides managed PgBouncer, you should use that instead:

# Your connection string should look like this for PgBouncer
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://user:password@db-postgresql-nyc1-xxxxx-pooler.db.ondigitalocean.com:25060/defaultdb?sslmode=require"

You can learn more about managing connection pools with DigitalOcean Managed Databases here:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/databases/postgresql/how-to/manage-connection-pools/#pooling-modes

Regarding the resources, before upgrading, you can check if slow queries are the culprit. You can visit the cluster’s Settings > Logs (or Logs & Queries). The Currently running queries section tracks all of the PostgreSQL cluster’s open connections, potentially resulting in queries with long durations.

If you find slow queries, you can optimize them by adding appropriate indexes. For example, if you’re frequently searching or sorting by ticket_number, you can add an index like this:

CREATE INDEX idx_ticket_number ON tickets (ticket_number);

To learn more about indexes, you can check out this tutorial here.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-explain-to-analyze-queries-in-postgresql

If after query optimization and connection pooling are in place, and you still see high load on the database, then you can consider upgrading the resources:

1. Current Configuration:

• 8 GB RAM
• 2 vCPUs
• 60 GB Disk

2. Potential Upgrade:

• 4 vCPUs
• 16 GB RAM
• Keep 60 GB Disk (unless you’re near capacity).

So my recommendation would be:

1. Enable DO’s managed PgBouncer
2. Run the slow query analysis
3. Add appropriate indexes based on findings
4. Monitor for 24-48 hours
5. If issues persist, then consider the hardware upgrade

DigitalOcean Managed Databases handle a lot of the optimization automatically, so focus on application-level optimizations first!

Another thing that you can consider here is caching. For example you can use a Redis cache for frequently accessed data that doesn’t change often to reduce the load on the database:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/databases/redis/

Feel free to share more details about your application and database usage, and I will be happy to provide more specific recommendations!

- Bobby