I am experiencing a little higher CPU load than I would like to see, and was wondering if it has to do with the number of connections (although many are idle). I am running PG 9.0.4/amd64 on FreeBSD 8.1., dual boxes running streaming replication. Hardware is a 16 core box with 96GB RAM, using 6GB of shared buffers. RAID 1 for OS, 12 drive RAID 10 for data, RAID 1 for logs. I am using pgbouncer as a connection pooler, with 200 max client connections, a default pool size of 100, and a reserve of 80. The number of backends running are between 40 and 70. I monitor the number of non-idle connections. Average is about 20, with non-frequent spikes going to about 40. My gut feeling is that I can probably reduce the pool size somewhat. Would reducing the number of backends relieve some of the load on the server (I am seeing a 5 min load of 12 more often than I would like to)? Also, for this size setup, what would be the recommended values for the pool sizes? I am certain the values are way above what they should be, but nbot certain. I posted here instead of the pgbouncer group hoping someone has experienced similar things. Prresently, I have the following load, last pid: 96231; load averages: 12.18, 11.07, 10.97 up 112+19:23:29 11:02:05 and this is the result from checking the state of pgbouncer: pgbouncer=# SHOW POOLS; database | user | cl_active | cl_waiting | sv_active | sv_idle | sv_used | sv_tested | sv_login | maxwait -----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+---------+---------+-----------+----------+--------- ishield | xxxxxxx | 48 | 0 | 48 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 pgbouncer | pgbouncer | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 (2 rows) pgbouncer=# SHOW POOLS; database | user | cl_active | cl_waiting | sv_active | sv_idle | sv_used | sv_tested | sv_login | maxwait -----------+-----------+-----------+------------+-----------+---------+---------+-----------+----------+--------- ishield | xxxxxxx | 55 | 0 | 55 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 pgbouncer | pgbouncer | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 (2 rows) Thanks in advance, Benjamin |