Postmasters pile up

Hi,

I'm running snort, ulogd and samhain on my system, all using persistent db
connections. Thereby I'm using sqlrelay for my websites (which maintains a
connection pool: default 3 persistent connections, maximal 15).
Although I'm now the only one using the webserver (for testing purposes only),
the number of postmaster processes keeps growing rather fast. It starts at 21
postmaster processes and then grows within less than a quarter to 50 and so
on. This leads to the maximum number of connections being reached.
Checking the connections with netstat, I can only find a few (<10) active at
any moment. Even when I'm not using sqlrelay, the number of postmasters keeps
growing.
Is this a known problem? What are possible causes, and what can I do about it?

I'm using Postgresql 7.4.1-2mdk on Mandrake 9.2.

Thanks in advance,

Erwin Van de Velde
Student of University of Antwerp,
Belgium