Re: postmaster processes

Andy Harrison <ah11(at)mlz(dot)us> writes:

> 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?

No, it doesn't. If a PG backend is hanging around, it means an
application is keeping it open. Most likely the app has a connection
pooling library that hangs onto connections rather than incur the
overhead of creating new ones for every request.

> 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.

See above. The app is in control--see if it has settings to control
the connection pool.

-Doug