[Pgpool-general] NOTIFY/LISTEN forwarding?

[Chad Robinson]

I'd really like to get pgpool going, but I'm having another problem with it. 
After connecting about 190 clients to it, clients start getting disconnected. 
I've set the following parameters:

num_init_children = 32
max_pool = 64
child_life_time = 0
connection_life_time = 0

Every few seconds, a few clients will get kicked off pgpool. Resources don't 
seem to be cleaned up on the Postgres server when this happens, either, so it 
looks like a "bad" event, not a "planned" event (like a timeout).

I'm not using replication or failover. I set the above parameters based on the 
following assumptions, please let me know if these are wrong:

1. Each child can have more than one client connected. I would have about 1200 
clients per box, and I would expect no more than 20 of them to be talking at 
once, on average. I figured 32 children, spreading the client load evenly 
among them, would be ideal. Each server would ideally support 800-1200 clients 
on average, up to around 1600, so this would leave some margin for growth 
(2048 max clients).

2. My clients are well-behaved about closing connections, so I don't need the 
timeouts, and they're undesirable since my clients may have a great deal of 
idle time in between queries.

What could I be doing wrong? Is there any other information I can provide? 
pgpool 2.4 and Postgres 8.0.1. If it matters, I can successfully connect all 
thousand clients directly to the Postgres backend, I'm just trying to reduce 
resource usage there since 8000+ clients requires a ridiculous amount of RAM.

Regards,
Chad