Performance is one of the key factors when considering PgBouncer in the first place. To make sure that performance stays high, some issues have to be taken seriously.

First of all, it is recommended to make sure that all nodes participating in your setup are fairly close to each other. This greatly helps reduce network round trip times, and thus boosts performance. There is no point in reducing the overhead of calling fork() and paying for this gain with network time. Just as in most scenarios, reducing network time and latency is definitely a huge benefit.

Basically, PgBouncer can be placed on a dedicated PgBouncer server, on the database node directly, or on the web server. In general, it is recommended to avoid putting database infrastructure onto the web server. If you have a larger setup, a dedicated server might be a good option. Mixing up things too much can lead to nasty side effects. If one component of the system starts to go crazy, it might have horrible side...