I’m seeing a few of these errors during high load times:
mysql_connect() [<a
href='function.mysql-connect'>function.mysql-connect</a>]: [2002] Resource
temporarily unavailable (trying to connect via
unix:///var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock)
From what I can tell the mysql server isn’t hitting its max connections limit, but there’s something else stopping it from serving the query. What other limits would MySQL be hitting?
I’m running RHEL 6.2 64bit with MySQL 5.5.21
I still haven’t found which limits it was hitting, but I did manage to work around the problem. There was a problem with our session table (in vbulletin) which uses the MEMORY engine. The indexes for this table were HASH and thus when vbulletin purged this table once an hour it would lock the table just long enough to hold up other queries and push mysql to the limit of its resources.
By changing the indexes to BTREE this allowed MySQL to delete the rows from the session table a lot quicker and avoid any limits there were reached previously. The errors only started when we upgraded our master db server to MySQL 5.5, so I’m guessing MEMORY tables are handled differently in the latest release.
See http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/02/01/performance-gotcha-of-mysql-memory-tables/ for information on speed increases from using BTREE indexes over HASH For MEMORY.