You seem to be running 32-bit Linux and have 349 concurrent connections. If you have not changed STACK_SIZE in LinuxThreads and built the binary yourself, LinuxThreads is quite likely to steal a part of the global heap for the thread stack. key_buffer_size=536870912 read_buffer_size=4190208 max_used_connections=373 max_connections=425 threads_connected=349 It is possible that mysqld could use up to key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_connections = 155068 0 K bytes of memory Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation.