I know this is an older post, but I just found it because I had the same error today in my postgres logs. I narrowed it down to a PDO select statement. I'm using Zend Framework 1.10.3 on Ubuntu Precise.
The following pdo statement generated an error if $opinion is a long text string. The column opinion is type Text in my postgres table. The query succeeds if $opinion is under a certain number of characters. 1000 characters works fine. 2000 characters fails with "could not receive data from client: Connection reset by peer".
$select = $this->db->select()
->from( 'datauserstopics' )
->where("opinion = ?",trim($opinion))
->where("datatopicsid = ?",trim($tid))
->where("datausersid= ?",$datausersid);
$stmt = $this->db->query($select);
I circumvented the problem by using: ->where("substr(opinion,1,100) = ?",trim(substr($opinion,1,100)))
This is not a perfect solution, but for my purposes, the select statement using substr() suffices.
Note that I have no problem inserting long strings into the same table/column. The disconnect problem only appears for me on the PDO select with relatively long text strings.