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.