database connection pooling, essential or overkill?

hey folks, ive been setting up a new application and was thinking about database connection pooling. were using PostgreSQL. for smaller apps, i often skip it and just openclose connections as needed. but for anything with even moderate traffic, it seems like a nobrainer for performance. however, ive also run into issues with pool configurations causing deadlocks or hitting connection limits unexpectedly. so, whats your general philosophy here? do you always implement connection pooling, or only when you hit performance bottlenecks? any gotchas i should be aware of when setting it up for Postgres?