Mail_queue hangs after c.150 inserts

Hi, I need help - I'm using a foreach loop to run through just over a thousand email addresses on a distribution list and put them into the mail_queue table prior to sending via cron overnight.

The loop executes fine and the onscreen output is completed as expected, however after about 150 inserts instead of returning the id, the error message "Mail Queue Error: Cannot connect to database" comes back for each iteration of the loop. The first 150 emails are committed to the db but the remainder aren't.

There is nothing obvious in any of the logs, all packages are up to date and the same sending system works fine on a small test db of ten or so addresses both before and after the attempted production run.

The emails are html email including two small images - I tried removing the images to see if the memory load was the problem and this didn't make any difference - it still hung same as before.

Anyone got any ideas of what I should check next or how to fix it?

After a weekend of head scratching it came down to explicitly declaring and then raising the my.cnf max_connections setting to an appropriate level. Many thanks to the pear mail_queue team for pointing me in the right direction.