postgres's idle process remains on BSD

Dear all,

I am running a PostgreSQL 7.3.2 on a FreeBSD.  A Tomcat server
connects to it locally by JDBC.
I created a test module which sends a http request to the Tomcat
server to store some data on DB.  The test module sends a http
request 5000 times continusly. After sending 5000 requests, a lot
of postgres idle processes remains, and if I send more request to
the server, the postgres stops accepting connection when the
number of postgres processes reaches 127 which is the same number
as postgres's max_connections.  The idle processes do not
disappear even two days passed.

Anybody have any idea what is going on?


At the beginning only 3 processes:
99832  p0- S      0:42.80 /usr/local/bin/postmaster (postgres)
99836  p0- S      0:03.71 postmaster: stats buffer process    (postgres)
99838  p0- S      0:08.67 postmaster: stats collector process (postgres)

As I acess to the Tomcat server:
18263  p0- I      0:00.01 postmaster: test tdb 127.0.0.1 idle (postgres)
18283  p0- I      0:00.01 postmaster: test tdb 127.0.0.1 idle (postgres)
18445  p0- I      0:00.01 postmaster: test tdb 127.0.0.1 idle (postgres)
these idle processes grow upto 127 processes which is same as
max_connection setting.

The specs:
FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE-p3
Apache 2.0.47
PostgreSQL 7.3.2
J2SDK 1.4.1p3_3
Jakarta-Tomcat 4.1.27

Thanks for any help,

Jun