Does mysql connections include guests?
 

Does max mysql connections include guests or just logged in users? I current have a plan that lets me have 25 and I need to know this.

Thanks!

Yes it includes guests and Spiders.

Every visitor causes vBulletin to connect to the database, so yes.

Thats too bad, I cant find one shared plan that lets you get above this

If you have more than one MySQL account, you can alter config.php to use a random one at run-time, so you get # of accounts * maximum connections per account.

Is that legal though?

Should be... if you are paranoid you can check your terms of service.

But the limit is X connections per account, so if you use more than one account, you aren't breaking the limitation. :)

Plus the connections only count if 25 people were to click at exactly the same time.

It's simply a limitation of Shared hosting. I'm looking at getting a dedicated machine for my site.

25 visitors does not mean that you have 25 open SQL connections. An SQL connection is opened when a script is called and will be closed again once the script has finished retrieving data and displaying it on a page.

This means that if 25 people would open a page each 5 seconds apart, then you will still have 25 users (with a 15 minute cookie timeout) but probably only 1 SQL connection at any time. On the other hand 1 user could be opening 30 pages at the same time and create 30 connections in this period.

Thanks for all the help with this, I finally understand what a Mysql connection is. :D