Responding to David's note that the forum appeared to be down or achingly slow late yesterday afternoon:
That was the point during which I was making some adjustments, at least 5 until 6 or so.
And, as general information:
Let’s see how things fare today. As I explained earlier, adding more connections can actually make things worse if the thing consuming the connections is nefarious. For example, if a search engine is consuming 100 of 150 MySQL connections and we add 150 more connections, that may just encourage the search engine to be more aggressive, which actually makes things even slower.
It’s a good idea to make small adjustments, as I did, then give it a few days to settle out and see how we are doing. We can also adjust web server, settings, etc.
So, keep us informed - either this new thread or the previous one are fine places to do that. The server folks are aware of this now and willing to do what they can to push back against server-slowing traffic.