Wouldn?t that seriously mar the growth of the forum? I mean if you restrict the search engine spiders, you will eventually get delisted. Its much better to just upgrade hardware and optimize software than stop the search engine bots.

Yes it'd totally defeat the purpose of any and all SEO work.

You simply need to raise the max connect user setting and if needed add a crawl delay to the robots.txt to just slow them down :D

VBSeo is a huge resource eater. Make sure you have your rewrite rules inside the .conf files and go to VBSeo on how to tweak it so it doesnt eat your server alive.

I can guarentee this is causing the issues for you.

I bet its not causing the issue. As vBSEO doesnt add users connecting the the DB, it may add a query here or there, but not an actual user to take up the max_connection slot

VBSeo can add some 15 queries per page easy especially if u have all the fancy features on.

max_connection has nothing to do with "actual users". If it adds a query, it will have to make a connection to the database (unless it reuses an existing connection).