Memory Limits when large number of users are 1 thread.

[Mack_au]

I've got into issues recently when I have a large number of users (say about 120 with a fair whack of guests), all in a single rapidly developing thread (live discussion of a football game).

I have seen the error message "MySQL Server Has Gone Away", although sometimes the page just fails to load and I get a timeout. Other users have noticed it as well.

My VPS host has told me I'm hitting memory limit. They gave me another 1gb for free (we have a cpanel VPS with I believe 5gb of ram now). Does this seem like an issue that matches the symptoms? Is there anything that can be done to diagnose and/or fix the issue?

Thanks.