One of the things that was causing slowdowns was using a transform stream to parse messages. Not a huge slowdown but the overhead of an additional event emitter versus a single callback. There is a lot more work to do here, but I am gonna merge this into master so we can get CI starting to work on the new code path to keep things from drifting again.

I also brought the new connection code in line w/ the existing code & changes from 8.0. Adding the new parsing code path to travis so I can ensure it works in all supported node versions.

I'll try to include my very, very crude benchmark numbers w/ PRs to track perf progress.

$ node bench && PG_FAST_CONNECTION=true node bench
warmup done

little queries: 3136
qps 627.2
on my laptop best so far seen 733 qps

sequence queries: 5305
qps 1061
on my laptop best so far seen 1209 qps

insert queries: 28998
qps 5799.6
on my laptop best so far seen 5600 qps
using faster connection
warmup done

little queries: 3607
qps 721.4
on my laptop best so far seen 733 qps

sequence queries: 6048
qps 1209.6
on my laptop best so far seen 1209 qps

insert queries: 24976
qps 4995.2
on my laptop best so far seen 5600 qps