I looked through the mysql manual for help on this and it doesn't seem to help.

I thought it was max_connections, which was set to about 1500, so I raised it up to 5000. I did a reboot and it went back to default, when I remembered - duh - to put it in the ini file on startup.

so I rebooted and the max_connections was set to 2800, not the 5000. So I made it 5600 in the ini file for next reboot. Perhaps it needs to be a multiple....

The timeout suggested by the manual just doesn't make sense. We have a very robust app, and each screen makes a connection when it loads. So the timeout doesn't make sense in this case.

What other stuff have you found that would cause this, and what ultimately fixes this?

Thanks all.