Out of your 4 gigabyte of memory, you allocate 2G to the innodb pool. Assuming you're using mostly innoDB, that's good. Say there's also about 300M allocated to the OS - assuming a dedicated server; that leaves about 1.7G for non-InnoDB operations.
You have configured your server for 500 connections, and specified both join_buffer_size and sort_buffer_size as 8M. Every session that needs to do a sort allocates one sort buffer of the specified size. One join buffer of *minimum* this size is allocated for every full join between two tables, so multiple buffers may be needed for a single query. 8M * 500 connections = 2G. Do you see where this is going ? :-) Not every connection will need to allocate join or sort buffers, but it may be well worth to see what's happening on your server when you get these out of memory errors, and maybe you can optimize some queries to use indices for sorting, add indices to remove full joins, et cetera. I keep telling people this: set up Munin or Cacti, and graph anything you can find about your server. Trending gives you both the ability to look back at what was going on when a problem occured, and look forward to see problems coming ahead of time. -- Bier met grenadyn Is als mosterd by den wyn Sy die't drinkt, is eene kwezel Hy die't drinkt, is ras een ezel
