total number of concurrent connections

Greetings,
I've got a postgresql-8.1.10 instance running on a Linux system.  Over
the weekend it suddenly started rejecting client connection attempts
with a "too many connected" error.  At the time, we were using the
default max_connections of 100.  I've doubled this for the time being
until we can determine what/why its misbehaving.

The real problem that I'm having is that I can't seem to find any
obvious way to determine what the current number of connections are to
the server.  Googling a bit suggests that running "select count(*)
from pg_stat_activity;" would provide the answer, however I'm very
suspicious of the accuracy of the results.  At this very minute, it
claims that there are just 3 connections, however I'm fairly confident
that there must be a lot more, as we've go about 200 client systems
running an in hour app that are continuously hitting the database
(every 30-60 seconds), plus a few web apps that are seeing some
activity (even over the weekend).  So just 3 seems wrong to me,
especially when I run 'netstat -a | grep -c postgr' and I get 183 back
(granted many are in a TIME_WAIT state, but shouldn't that still count
as a valid connection to the database?).  For example, here's the
current output:

select * from pg_stat_activity ;
 datid | datname | procpid | usesysid |  usename  |
current_query         | query_start |         backend_start         |
client_addr | client_port

-------+---------+---------+----------+-----------+------------------------------+-------------+-------------------------------+-------------+-------------
 16636 | nightly |   29579 |    16386 | lfriedman | <command string
not enabled> |             | 2009-07-26 13:07:38.139417-07 |
  |          -1
 16636 | nightly |   22822 |       10 | postgres  | <command string
not enabled> |             | 2009-07-26 13:00:02.723319-07 |
  |          -1
 65770 | minidvs |   22662 |    16386 | lfriedman | <command string
not enabled> |             | 2009-07-26 09:48:22.958256-07 |
  |          -1
(3 rows)


Another thing that makes no sense is why the client_addr is seemingly
null (is there some postgresql.conf option that I should be setting or
changing?).

I'll be very happy to hear that I'm misunderstanding something.

Thanks in advance for guidance.

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                                    netllama@gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org