[pgpool-general: 841] pgpool just hangs up after reaching "num_init_children" connections

[Gnanakumar]

Hi,

Our Production is running PostgreSQL 8.2.22 and pgpool-II- 3.1.1.  In our
case, pgpool is exclusively used for connection pooling purpose and we're
not using other features of pgpool like replication, load balance, parallel
query, etc.

Recently, in our Production server, number of "concurrent database access
and/or users" in the application has reached more than "num_init_children"
defined in pgpool, that is more than 450 in my case.  Once it has reached
"num_init_children" connections, the application has totally stopped
responding.  pgpool has just hung up and was not able to release any
existing connection and distribute new connection.  But at "this same"
moment, I could able to login to database directly on 5432 port and when I
tried to get a list of running queries using: 

select date_trunc('second', current_timestamp - query_start) as runtime,
datname as database_name, usename as user_name, current_query from
pg_stat_activity where current_query != '<IDLE>' order by 1 desc;

I don't see any queries being held up running for a very long time (I can
even say, there were only 4 rows returned) .  But eventually, we ended up
restarting pgpool.

NOTE: We've only one user connecting to the database from our application,
so "max_pool" is set to '1'.

On running 'ps -ef |grep pgpool', I'm finding *all* the 450 processes are
showing up in "idle" as given below:

		myuser    8947  2363  0 17:16 ?        00:00:00 pgpool:
myuser mydb 127.0.0.1(45877) idle

My questions are:
	1) Why pgpool just hangs up/freezes after reaching
"num_init_children" connections?
	2) In order to set the right value for "num_init_children", we want
to find out the maximum connection reached at any given timeframe from
pgpool log, in 	   case if we decide to increase "num_init_children" value.
Is it possible to determine this information from pgpool?
	   We even tried out setting "debug_level" to '1' but no info/clues
here.

Important pgpool parameters:
# - Pool size -
num_init_children = 450
max_pool = 1

# - Life time -
child_life_time = 300
child_max_connections = 20
connection_life_time = 120
client_idle_limit = 0

Regards,
Gnanam