As a followup to my previous MySQL bug post, I tried PostgreSQL and didn’t like it all that much. I found there was too much of a learning curve for someone who’s only really used MySQL to any great extent. It’s probably a better alternative for someone who is used to something like Oracle.
In the end, although it’s not a fully released product, I decided to try MySQL 5.0 instead – it was up to 5.0.13, a release candidate so I was fairly happy with it being relatively bug-free and stable. Either this or the upgrade in memory seems to have solved the problem of heavy concurrent use corrupting indexes to the point where the number of simultaneous connections can be increased a bit more to make the site even faster.
It’s been up and running fine for 4 and a half days now which is a record compared to the beginning of last week.
Thanks for the extra info