Noah Silverman <noah@allresearch.com> writes:
> It actually looks like the problem was with file descriptors. Our
> shell only had 1024 set, and we also have mysql running and using up a
> bunch of those. We just upped to limit to 8000 to see it that would
> give postgres more room to breathe.
Ah-hah. You might also want to set max_files_per_process (in
postgresql.conf) to something small enough to ensure Postgres can't run
you out of descriptors. Linux has a bad habit of promising more than
it can deliver when Postgres asks how many FDs are okay to use. The
max_files_per_process setting is useful to prevent Postgres from
believing whatever fairy-tale sysconf(3) tells it.
regards, tom lane