multiple postmasters

Hi,
We're running postgresql 7.0.2 on solaris 5.7.  The admin docs say that only
one postmaster process should be running.  However, our "master" postmaster
process (PID=560 below) appears to have spawned off a couple of other
postmaster processes:

     UID   PID  PPID  C    STIME TTY      TIME CMD
 bimaadm   560     1  0   Nov 27 ?        1:24 /appl/bima/pgsql/bin/postmaster -S -i
 bimaadm 10237   560  0 17:16:53 ?        0:04 /appl/bima/pgsql/bin/postmaster -S -i
 bimaadm 10240   560  0 17:17:00 ?        0:06 /appl/bima/pgsql/bin/postmaster -S -i

Is this normal?  If not, what could be the cause of this?  Our user
interface currently processes queries using the Pg.pm perl module and the
JDBC interface.

Thanks
Dave


--
David Mehringer, Ph.D.            University of Illinois
dmehring@astro.uiuc.edu           National Center for Supercomputing
Research Scientist,               Applications/Department of Astronomy
Software Applications Developer,  1002 W. Green St.
BIMA Data Archivist               Urbana, IL 61801 USA
voice: 217 244 5468               fax: 217 244 7638
http://monet.astro.uiuc.edu/~dmehring/dmehring.html