[CAP_NET_ADMIN]

Why would you do 50k+ connections if they can't be active all at once either way? Unless you have 50k+ cores and IO beefy enough not to get overwhelmed due to that.

You can have as much connections as you want, but you'll have to trade it for having lower work mem numbers, which hurts performance. Traditional advice is to keep it below 500 per PostgreSQL instance (I'd say physical host).

I've ran dozens of micro services handling thousands of requests per second with a total connection limit of around 200 of which most was still unused - all without any server-side pooler.

[samlambert]

because people run large amounts of front ends and workers that create a significant amount of connections. it doesn't matter if they are all active.

[throwaway313373]

Why would you want every "frontend" keep an open connection all the time?

> it doesn't matter if they are all active

It does, if the connection is inactive (doesn't hold an open transaction) you should close it or return it to the pool.