> if you have enough RAM That's the key difference here, combined with the observation that for user-facing web applications, a decent portion of direct DB con

> if you have enough RAM That's the key difference here, combined with the observation that for user-facing web applications, a decent portion of direct DB connections (i.e. without a multiplexing proxy or conn pool) tend to be idle at any given time. Assuming good configuration of session-level buffer sizes, MySQL can happily have several thousand idle connections at any given time, with no detrimental performance penalty and without requiring a massive amount of RAM. It's been a while since I've examined Postgres under similar conditions, but previously this certainly was not the case there.