On a project I'm working on we are using PgCat as the PostgreSQL frontend. We chose it mainly based on gut feeling as pgbouncer seems a bit dated, although it would have arguably been the safe choice. I was looking into the connection times using our tracing tool (Sentry) and noticed that establishing connections takes about 50ms. That is a bit slow, right? It was easy enough to confirm that it is indeed very slow. Establishing a direct connection to the mostly idle Postgres is in the sub-5ms range. I quickly found a ticket about connection slowness, hinting that the problem could be related to TCP_NODELAY. Essentially, it disables Nagle's algorithm , which batches small packets together. I guess that establishing connections from the client to PgCat is such a light process that the extra buffering is actively harmful. And sure enough, after upgrading PgCat, we see sub 5ms connection times. So why use PgCat at all? For us, it is for scaling purposes but not for load distri
I bought or technically leased a Canyon Precede:ON 7 (2022) electric bike last fall. This post is about my experiences with it after riding for about 2000 km this winter. The season was a bit colder than usual, and we had more snow than in years, so I properly put the bike through its paces. I've been cycling for almost 20 years. I've never owned a car nor used public transport regularly. I pedal all distances below 30km in all seasons. Besides commuting, I've mountain biked and raced BMX, and I still actively ride my road bike during the spring and summer months. I've owned a handful of bikes and kept them until their frames failed. Buying new bikes or gear has not been a major part of my hobby, and frankly, I'm quite sceptical about the benefits of updating bikes or gear frequently. I've never owned an E-bike before, but I've rented one a couple of times. The bike arrived in a hilariously large box. I suppose there's no need to worry about damage durin