Postgres pg_pconnect

Anon

Has anyone seen the error?
POSTGRESQL: Too many open persisent connections(2)

I am opening 2 connections on each request. It occurs when I have pgsql.max_persistent =2 and the number of postmasters reaches twice the numbre of httpd's. Should it not stop trying to open any new connection at this point since each apache process has its 2 open connections?

Anon

I never did get pg_pconnect() to work reliably. There are lots of complaints out there about it, but all I did was give up and use plain pg_connect().

[deleted]

"Should it not stop trying to open any new connection at this point since each apache process has its 2 open connections?"

Kirk is right, pconnect is not very reliable in these kind of things.

In it's defence however:
PHP can only stop trying to open new connections if it does not need more open connections. If you run two instances of your script and they happen to end up on the same httpd child, then PHP has no choice but to open more connections. And at that point, your max_persistant=2 forces the error.

Anon

I was thinking that each httpd session can only serves one web request at a time. If it can hadle more then one then my max_persistant=2 world cause the error. I tried setting it to -1 for unlimited, but this is a heavily hit server and the number of persistant connects quickly grows to over 500 and crashes the server. Any suggestions?
Thanks

[deleted]

Stop using pconnect?
Increase the server's memory?
Add a second server for load-balancing?

gid__

I agree with vincent. pconnect is just not a very good idea. Try looking that the optimizing postgres article if you haven't already, I believe it is still on the front page.