Why do you recommend pgbouncer? Did you face any issues with pgpool?

i was just researching that yesterday: performance.

see for example http://www.last.fm/user/Russ/journal/2008/02/21/zd_postgres_...

in short: pgpool is an old-fashioned unix architecture (process based), pgbouncer is fancy event based. so it usually is a bit more performant. reliable are both so that should not make any difference.

Did some tests. pgbouncer was faster. Something about pgpool using DML while pgbouncer operates at a much lower level.