Idle processes won't die

Hi everyone, using mod_perl with Postgres, postgres is on the same
server as the webserver.  Perl is opening connections, and then closing
them at the end of every script, however Pg
is refusing to close the connection, and I have tons and tons of Idle
processes sitting around, which causes the web site to crash because
the maximum number of pgsql processes gets reached after the site is
accessed 32 times.  From everything I know about Perl, even if I didn't
implicitly close the database handles, the perl garbage handler would
close them for me.  Is there some sort of configuration for postgres to
disallow all these idle processes from sticking around, so they
maybe... close themselves after 5 seconds or something similar?