Load balancing: Workaround for maxconnections issue?

[minstrel]

SMF Version: SMF 1.1 RC2
My host has a limit of 50K MySQL connections per hour which my forum is now running into.

I am told that I can get around this by creating additional users and having the forum switch among them on a random basis.

In settings.php, lines 40-41:

Code Select Expand

$db_user = 'username';
$db_passwd = 'password';


I need to change this to

Code Select Expand

{if some random number} then
$db_user = 'username';
$db_passwd = 'password';
else {if some other random number}
$db_user = 'username2';
$db_passwd = 'password2';
else {if some other random number}
$db_user = 'username3';
$db_passwd = 'password3';
...

etc.

How can I do this?

[Ben_S]

Have you tried using persistant connections?

[minstrel]

No.

What will that do and how will it help?

I was under the impression that would increase server load in some way...

It's shared hosting,, not dedicated...

[Ben_S]

It means MySQL won't close the connection when it's finnished with it meaning that it will be reused when someone else visits. As for increasing load, in reality, it should decrease it as it gets rid of the overhead of opening and closing connections, although the way some shared hosts have things set up, they don't like persistant connections.

[minstrel]

I'll give it a shot.

[Skipdawg]

Let us know how it goes. I may give it a shot on my VPS if it helps some.

[minstrel]

Well, it hasn't crashed anything yet.

I will report back...

[minstrel]

Update: It's been about 48 hours now since I made the change to "Persistent connections". So far, so good -- nothing has crashed and I haven't received another "excess connections" error from tyhe server.

[Ben_S]

Would expect it to be fine, my forum runs at a nice gentle 1788 connections / hour and is probably a tad larger than yours.

[Gargoyle]

the way some shared hosts have things set up, they don't like persistant connections.

Could you explain why ?? I asked my host about persistant conections and they were against me enabling it. I'm just curious as to why ??

Thanks!

[Ben_S]

The main reason is likely to be because the max_connections (the maximum number of concurrent connections at any one time) setting is global so if they have it set to say 500 and a lot of customers have persistant connections enabled, then they are more likely to reach that limit and futhur connections will be locked out for a short while giving connection errors.

[Gargoyle]

I see... Thank-you Ben..