Re: idle connections

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Aras Angelo <araskoktas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Im seeing lots of idle connections (not idle in transaction) to my database
> server. My front end is written with PHP and i couldnt find anything that
> can cause this. If i do a kill proc-id every few minutes on my server via
> cron, would this effect anything badly?

Are you using pg_pconnect?

pg_pconnect is a foot gun waiting to happen. It's an otherwise very
useful foot gun, but a foot gun none-the-less.

The problem is that by default apache is usually set up to have more
max connections / children / threads etc. than postgresql is to have
backends available. This just gets worse if you run < 1 apache server
machine.

The simple solution is to turn off pg_pconnect.

If things are then too slow then you can start planning for
connection pooling / pg_pconnect otherwise don't sweat it. For low
level intranet servers, regular pg_connect will work just fine.