title: Can Octopus keep a pool of database connections?
body: <p>We switched to using Octopus for sharding in our <code>rails2.3/postgresql/resque</code> app because we were maxing out the disk I/O of our database server. We have ten databases, each with multiple shards. (A shard includes a schema search path).</p>
  
  <p>Some of our processes that work across multiple customers are very slow. </p>
  
  <p>Here is the structure of the code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>User.each do |u|
    Octopus.using(u.shard.to_sym) do
       update data
    end
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>We suspect that the issue is Octopus is constantly opening and closing database connections. </p>
  
  <p>Is this how Octopus works?  Can it keep a pool of database connections?</p>