Postmaster : postgres idle connection

[senternal]

I passed php3 to php4 and postgreSQL 6.5 to 7.x few weeks ago. Web application were developed on the first platform (php3/postgres6.5).

We have some trouble now on our new platform (php4/postgres7) with postgres persistent connection (pg_pconnect). I mean I got more and more idle process on my FreeBSD server...

May someone already had this problem ??? Finally I received "Too many clients
already connected" if I tried to manually connect to my databases using psql...

top

30387 p1 I 0:00.21 postmaster: nobody hotel [local] idle (postgres)
30388 p1 I 0:00.14 postmaster: nobody globe [local] idle (postgres)
30399 p1 I 0:00.42 postmaster: nobody hotel [local] idle (postgres)
30400 p1 I 0:00.26 postmaster: nobody globe [local] idle (postgres)
30447 p1 I 0:00.54 postmaster: nobody hotel [local] idle (postgres)

[smarlowe]

This is a common problem when there are more apache processes than postgresql is set to handle.

Look for the MaxClients setting in apache, and make sure it is lower than the max_connections setting in the postrgresql.conf file. That should get rid of the persistant connection issue, but really, unless you're doing a whole lot of connectiong/disconnecting on a heavily loaded machine, pg_connect is MUCH safer and easier to use, just a little slower, but not a big issue for most medium ot low load servers.