I've just moved my site to a new host and have found that I am now encountering lots of max_user_connections errors. My new host tells me that the max_user_connections is set to 20 and that if it needs to be higher than this then I must have a problem with my code. (failing to close connections or inefficient queries)

However, I never had this issue on my previous host. I don't know what max_user_connections was set at there.

Perhaps my new host is right and I am checking my code. Perhaps they are just being mean with this setting to protect their setup. I don't know enough about standard setup to determine this myself.

Can anyone enlighten me? Is it most likely that my php is causing the problem. Is 20 too low a setting? I could get round the problem by creating different DB accounts for each page to distribute the load but this seems to be contrived. Any thoughts anyone?

For info, most of my users login just after a batch update runs on my site so that upto 1000 users are loading pages within a 15 minute period.

thanks in advance