Postgres server goes in recovery mode repeteadly

Hi ,
We are using Postgres 8.4 and its been found going into recovery
mode couple of times. The server process seems to fork another child process
which is another postgres server running under same data directory and after
some time it goes away while the old server is still running. There were few
load issues on the server but the load didnt went above "32".

We are running opensuse 10.2 x86_64 with 32Gb of physical memory.
Checking the logs I found that theres a segmentation fault ,

Sep 26 05:39:54 pace kernel: postgres[28694]: segfault at 0000000000000030
rip 000000000066ba8c rsp 00007fffd364da30 error 4

gdb dump shows this

Reading symbols from /lib64/libdl.so.2...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib64/libdl.so.2
Reading symbols from /lib64/libm.so.6...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib64/libm.so.6
Reading symbols from /lib64/libc.so.6...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib64/libc.so.6
Reading symbols from /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
Reading symbols from /lib64/libnss_files.so.2...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib64/libnss_files.so.2
0x00002ad6d7b8c2b3 in __select_nocancel () from /lib64/libc.so.6
(gdb)

Any suggestions what is causing this segmentation fault?