postmaster processes

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Could anyone explain about the max_connections in postgres?

We ran into the connection limit on one of our production servers. One reason
is that we have more apps that use postgres running on it (RT3 and Webcollab
were added not long ago). Webcollab, for instance, seems to keep 7 postmaster
processes all to itself. Is this normal? Does postgres work similarly to
how apache handles spawning spare servers?

I notice also on my test server, that 7 postmaster processes for webcollab are
running, even though I'm the only one who has used it, and not all that
heavily, and they haven't been touched for two days.

# ps -U pgsql -ax -o pid,ppid,start,time,command
PID PPID STARTED TIME COMMAND
4876 1 18Aug03 0:08.35 /usr/local/bin/postmaster (postgres)
4880 4876 18Aug03 0:00.04 postmaster: stats buffer process (postgres)
4881 4880 18Aug03 0:00.18 postmaster: stats collector process (postgres)
24053 4876 Tue11AM 0:00.09 postmaster: webcollab webcollab [local] idle
(postgres)
24054 4876 Tue11AM 0:00.06 postmaster: rt3 rt3 127.0.0.1 idle (postgres)
24060 4876 Tue11AM 0:00.05 postmaster: rt3 rt3 127.0.0.1 idle (postgres)
24062 4876 Tue11AM 0:00.09 postmaster: webcollab webcollab [local] idle
(postgres)
24230 4876 Tue02PM 0:00.05 postmaster: webcollab webcollab [local] idle
(postgres)
24231 4876 Tue02PM 0:00.53 postmaster: webcollab webcollab [local] idle
(postgres)
24236 4876 Tue02PM 0:00.44 postmaster: webcollab webcollab [local] idle
(postgres)
24237 4876 Tue02PM 0:01.35 postmaster: webcollab webcollab [local] idle
(postgres)
24238 4876 Tue02PM 0:02.45 postmaster: webcollab webcollab [local] idle
(postgres)

Could anyone enlighten me? I already tried digging through various docs and
list archives, but didn't turn up much. If you could point me to some specific
reading that would be appreciated as well. Thanx!

~~
Andy Harrison
(full headers for details)

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