After looking at some of the factors that can affect this, I think it may be important to know that most of the connections will be almost idle (in terms of interacting with the DB). The "users" are perl/dbi scripts which connect to the DB and spend the vast majority of the time doing things other than interacting with the DB. So a connection is consumed, but it's not really working very hard with the DB per-se. I am cleaning up some of that code by strategically connecting/disconnecting only when a DB interaction is required. But for my edification, is it roughly true that 2 connections working with the DB 100% of the time is equivalent to 20 connections @ 10% = 200 connections @ 1 % (if you know what I mean) ?