i am trying to setup a new server running on debian6 and trying to make it work smooth under load. i ve used a wordpress site as a test object, and tried the configurations on http://blitz.io. when i increase the mysql max_connections from 50 to 200 lots of timeouts start to occur. but on 50 , no timeouts and pretty well response times. nginx configuration is fine , i tuned the config so i dont see errors. so i presume it's related to the other configuration options of my.cnf . i read some about options but still cant find what max_connections problem is all about. btw, the server has 16gb of ram and a fine i7 cpu.

here is the current my.cnf

[client]
port        = 3306
socket      = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
[mysqld_safe]
socket      = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
nice        = 0
[mysqld]
wait_timeout=60
connect_timeout=10
interactive_timeout=120
user        = mysql
pid-file    = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
socket      = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
port        = 3306
basedir     = /usr
datadir     = /var/lib/mysql
tmpdir      = /tmp
language    = /usr/share/mysql/english
skip-external-locking

bind-address        = 127.0.0.1

key_buffer      = 384M
max_allowed_packet  = 16M
thread_stack        = 192K
thread_cache_size       = 20

myisam-recover         = BACKUP
max_connections        = 50
table_cache            = 1024
thread_concurrency     = 8
query_cache_limit   = 2M
query_cache_size        = 128M
expire_logs_days    = 10
max_binlog_size         = 100M
[mysqldump]
quick
quote-names
max_allowed_packet  = 16M

[mysql]
#no-auto-rehash # faster start of mysql but no tab completition

[isamchk]
key_buffer      = 16M

thanks in advance.

i asked this question on SO but it's closed as off topic so i believe this is a SF question.