sensible configuration of max_connections

Chris Withers <chris@withers.org>

From: Chris Withers <chris@withers.org>
To: pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2020-02-07T08:35:45Z
Lists: pgsql-general
Hi All,

What's a sensible way to pick the number to use for max_connections?

I'm looking after a reasonable size multi-tenant cluster, where the 
master handles all the load and there's a slave in case of hardware 
failure in the master.
The machine is used to host what I suspect are mainly django 
applications, so lots of short web requests, not sure how much, if any, 
django's orm does connection pooling.

I arbitrarily picked 1000 for max_connections and haven't had any 
problems, but onboarding another app that handles a few million requests 
per day  on Monday and thinking about potential problems related to the 
number of available connections.

What's "too much" for max_connections? What happens when you set it to 
high? What factors affect that number?

cheers,

Chris