Why Serverless Breaks Database Connections—and How PgBouncer Fixes It

Serverless functions create a new database connection with each invocation, making traditional connection pooling impossible and causing exhaustion failures under real load. PgBouncer multiplexes many application connections through a smaller pool of actual database connections, solving this critical production problem. Properly configuring Supabase's built-in PgBouncer on Vercel prevents the connection exhaustion that breaks most Next.js apps at scale.