Correct way to implement a connection pool

Question

I'm trying to write a multithreading program that connects to a MySQL database and processes the returned set for a query (which has thousands of rows). The problem is that I have implemented the connection pool and I get every thread to open the connection to the database and get the resulting set. But I don't understand which is the advantage of using connection-pooling if retrieving that big set takes such a lot of time. It wouldn't be better if I get the whole set with only one connection (without using pooling) and then I use thread pooling to process it? Or is there a way that every thread takes the next row of the resulting set?

Answer 1

If you have a limited number of threads, I would have a connection per thread.

A connection pool is more efficient if the number of threads which could use a connection is too high and those thread use the connections a relatively low percentage of the time.