[Fwd: postgres 8.4.1 number of connections]

we have this application (using jboss/java/hibernate) on linux accessing 
data on 3 postgres database servers using 8.4.1. 

One of our many concerns has been the way we handle connections to the 
database.  java/hibernate handle their own pooling so I understand that 
using anything else is out of the question.  Our jboss configuration 
currently defaults to 5 connections per database.  On our main database 
server, we handle 7 of the databases that this application uses.  On 
this one server, we usually average around 300 - 500 connections to the 
server.  In our postgres conf file on this particular machine we set the 
max_connection parameter to 1000.  If we set it to much lower we end up 
with connection errors.  Any comments or better way to handle this?

thanks,  Maria Wilson
NASA, Langley Research Center
Hampton, Virginia 23666