[Pgpool-general] pgpool-2.1 started rejecting all connections

[Eric]

I have an install of pgpool-2.1 on FreeBSD 6.0 (AMDx64) that had been
happily running for 73 days+ at around 250k unique connections per day
coming from psycopg2 on the local machine. pgpool is set up just to
pool connections to a remote machine -- no HA, no replication, etc.
All connections are made under two different usernames, no more.

Suddenly, all attempts at connection via psycopg2 started yielding:

    OperationalError: server closed the connection unexpectedly
    This probably means the server terminated abnormally
    before or while processing the request.

I was unable to connect via psql, either, through pgpool. I could
connect normally to PostgreSQL on the remote machine.

pgpool was still running, there was nothing in any logs about any
problems. I didn't have connection logging turned on, but no error
conditions were raised, either, but pgpool stopped responding to new
connection requests.

I issued a `pgpool stop; pgpool` command and things immediately went
back to normal.

I'm in the process of testing/upgrading to the more recent version of
pgpool, but I did not see any items in the change logs/NEWS indicating
anything like this was mentioned or resolved.

Any ideas on how I can prevent this? I'd rather not bandaid over this
with a cron to run `pgpool stop; pgpool`.