can't get connection during pg_dump

Hi,

I'm running 8.1.x on FC2 with smp.

The docs claim that pg_dump should allow normal operation of the db with the exception of things like 'VACUUM FULL'.

Last night during backup, I noticed that I could not get a connection, either remotely via jdbc or locally via psql. Well perhaps that is inaccurate: 'ps -ef' showed several processes with a status message of "waiting to startup" (or something similar; sorry, I was late-night coding and didn't think to write it down).

My installation has three databases in use. The command used to invoke the dump of one of these databases was:
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_dump -Fc -b mydatabasename > /back/mydatabasename.dump

I looked through the docs to see if there was some runtime configuration I was missing, but saw nothing.

Anyone know what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks,
--
Steve Linabery, sysadmin/developer
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