I have this question asked in the Go mailing list, but I think it is more general to get better response from SO.
When work with Java/.Net platform, I never had to manage database connection manually as the drivers handle it. Now, when try to connect to a no sql db with very basic driver support, it is my responsibility to manage the connection. The driver let connect, close, reconnect to a tcp port, but not sure how should i manage it (see the link). Do i have to create a new connection for each db request? can I use other 3rd party connection pooling libraries?
thanks.
I don't know enough about MongoDB to answer this question directly, but do you know how MongoDB handles requests over TCP? For example, one problem with a single TCP connection can be that the db will handle each request serially, potentially causing high latency even though it may be bottlenecking on a single machine and could handle a higher capacity.
Are the machines all running on a local network? If so, the cost of opening a new connection won't be too high, and might even be insignificant from a performance perspective regardless.
My two cents: Do one TCP connection per request and just profile it and see what happens. It is very easy to add pooling later if you're DoSing yourself, but it may never be a problem. That'll work right now, and you won't have to mess around with a third party library that may cause more problems than it solves.
Also, TCP programming is really easy. Don't be intimidated by it, detecting a closed socket, and reconnecting synchronously or asynchronously is simple.
Most mongodb drivers (clients) will create and use a connection pool when connecting to the server. Each socket (connection) can do one operation at a time at the server; because of how data is read off the socket you can issue many requests and server will just get them one after another and return data as each one completes.
There is a Go mongo db driver but it doesn't seem to do connection pooling. http://github.com/mikejs/gomongo
In addition to the answers here: if you find you do need to do some kind of connection pooling redis.go is a decent example of a database driver that pools connections. Specifically, look at the Client.popCon and Client.pushCon methods in the source.