A lost connection during a query can be caused by other things also. If there is a hardware problem on the machine itself, such as bad RAM chip, etc... then communication can be interrupted. Also, if the kernel itself or the software connecting to MySQL has a problem, you can be hit by this.
In other words, it might not be a MySQL problem at all, but something in I/O or related software. Have you looked at '/var/log/messages'? Also, what happens in the Apache error log, whenever you have this problem. (usually in /var/log/httpd/error_log). Then finally, check your MySQL error log ("/path/to/mysql/data/hostname.err"

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The server itself might just be getting bogged down. Chillisoft is not the fastest piece of software on the block. I personally loath the idea of trying to implement ASP on a non-Windows system. I assume you are running a Linux server. Sometimes Linux requires a lot more tuning to get it to handle the load you experience. I have had this sort of problem several times on Linux systems.
If this is an older Linux kernel, such as the 2.2 series, then you also might be running into the "max file descriptors" limit. Many of those systems defaulted to allowing a maximum of 1024 file descriptors in use at any time. This may sound like a lot, but if 150 people hit your site at one time, and the page they request has other includes, and also you are saving session data in tempfiles, you can run into that limit really fast. -------------------------------------------
"Calculus is just the meaningless manipulation of higher symbols"
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