UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming MySQL and Server Configuration Is this limiting my MAX amount of simultaneous users?

The "my.cnf" file contains just 3 lines, one of them being:

set-variable = max_connections=500

Is this limiting the number of users that can simultanously access my board?

We just broke the "Max users online was..." record with 531 simultanous users, but I take it that only 500 could have been connected at any given moment, and that the 531 is a result of the "Who's Online Timeframe" set to 30 minutes. Does this explanation seem correct?

No,

the value in the mysql configuration is related to the concurrent connections to the mysql server.
This number differs from the concurrent users online.
As you set, max users online uses a timeframe of x minutes while the max_connection value refers to a point of time.

So it's not limiting your max users online at the moment. If so, a mysql error will occur.

OK, good stuff, thanks! So this isn't the setting that web hosts use to limit people's discussion forums to x amount of users at any given time?

What's the quickest way to check the max users online setting on my server?

[]Conrad said:
OK, good stuff, thanks! So this isn't the setting that web hosts use to limit people's discussion forums to x amount of users at any given time?
[/]
Your web host can't restrict the number of users directly. With that limit, they can influence the number of concurrent connections to the mysql server. Other limitations are the bandwith or your account, the used hardware etc.

[]
What's the quickest way to check the max users online setting on my server? [/]
There's no quick way to do that.
There are many parameters, which influence this for example:

- CPU
- speed of hdd
- RAM
- used file system
- mysql configuration
- used webserver
- configuration of webserver
- number of mysql queries that are send by your forum software
- kind of mysql queries
- your board settings
- size of your database

Thanks Astaran. The main thing that concerns me is a software-type of limit set on the server, like the concurrent connections limit. Mine is set to 500 which is the default, but since I'm on a dedicated server I can alter that to what I want.

Should I up this setting if I'm expecting 700+ simultaneous users online?

No, from my experience, you can handle about 500 users online with 100 concurrent mysql connections.

OK, many thanks for clearing this up. I take it this would be a problem if I had persistent connections on, right?

Speaking on this, is it worth enabling persistent connections if I have a dedicated server? Would this improve anything in any way?

Unless you really know what you're doing, do not use persistant connections. There are some setups where persistant connections are useful, but in most cases, it's getting worser than better.

Many thanks, I see that Jeremy's script also dishes out the following info: Max_used_connections

I understand this is linked to the setting "set-variable = max_connections=500" in my.cnf, right?

With 671 simultaneous users online Jeremy's script showed: Max_used_connections | 127

Guess there's no reason to bump up the 500 max connections then...