load balancing using pgpool vs rails octopus?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Recently we thought of using Heroku postgres Follower/slave database for our read requests. Now I am confused between the below 2 approaches.

  1. Use octopus rails gem to load balance between various slaves/followers.

  2. Using pgpool for load balancing. Basically pgpool is a middleware that sits between app server and db server. App server connects to this middleware instead of connecting to db server directly and pgpool will be responsible for load balance between various slaves.

I am not sure if we should go with both the approach or choose one. I am completely new to this kind of setup. I may be missing some basic key points.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated .