Connecting via the UNIX domain socket to the backend servers skips the whole networking stack. This removes the extra network hop that proxies introduce thus improving query latency when the backend server is located on the same node as MaxScale.

The main reason why this is an interesting idea is that it allows no-overhead reads when MaxScale is deployed on the same node as the MariaDB server. In roughly one third of the connections it would also provide no-overhead writes with redundancy making MaxScale very efficient. In addition to the performance improvements, it could make for a cheaper and simpler setup where the server and MaxScale are both deployed as one.

This feature requires that MaxScale either detects local servers automatically or it can be configured to connect to the socket.