[GENERAL] newbie ?'s

[Clayton Vernon]

First off, what a wonderful mail list! I've been listening in for a couple of days now, and it is marvelous the community you people have.   I'm new to this software, so I won't waste much of your time, but I'm curious as to the architecture of the server-side daemon, etc.   1) Do you have to specify in advance the full number of processes, or does it dynamically manage them ala Apache?   2) If your site was busy, will requests queue up civilly or will they typically bomb right away if they can't find an idle process.   3) I've been told PostgreSQL databases must be periodically "rebuilt" so to speak, ("vacuumed"). Is this easy to do on-the-fly? Rapid? Or, does the db need to go down awhile?   4) I can't find anything yet in the docs on on-the-fly backups of the db. Can you simply copy the directory, or will this not have integrity? What is the best strategy to study for backing up of databases that may be in use 7x24?   5) This seemingly full-fledged password overhead is worrisome. Is this tedious to manage in practice? Can the same (quasi-generic) user be reading the database from many simultaneous processes?   Clayton Vernon Houston, Texas