How to use pooling with node-persist?

Pooling is not enabled by default, and needs to be manually enabled by specifying the pooling option and a pooling name.

You can verify this by looking at the code for connect in persist.js:

if (opts.pooling && opts.pooling.name) {
  ... // Pooling is setup here
  return pool.acquire(connectAfterAutoDefinesComplete.bind(this, callback));
} else {
  return driver.connect(opts, connectAfterAutoDefinesComplete.bind(this, callback));
}

To answer your question directly:

You may enable pooling by providing the options as specified in the linked example, and you would disable pooling by not providing these options in your database.json.