[R-sig-DB] RMySQL cannot allocate a new connection

[Paul Gilbert]

  I have recently started getting error messages

Error: RS-DBI driver: (d/mysqld.sockcannot allocate a new connection -- 
maximum
of 16 connections already opened)

The server has a max connections set to 500, which is verified from the 
R session with

    mysqlQuickSQL(ets, "show variables;")

so the error message does not seem to be reflecting the real problem. I 
am also getting

Warning in mysqlQuickSQL(conn, statement, ...) : pending rows
Warning in mysqlFetch(res, n, ...) :
   RS-DBI driver warning: (error while fetching rows)

I am using  RMySQL 0.9-3 (on Ubuntu)  and am now using R-3.0.0 but the 
problem started before the new R version.  The same code did work in the 
past (circa Dec 2012), but I'm not certain about the version numbers 
then. I've probably upgraded my server since then too.

Does anyone know how to deal with this, or what the cause is?

Is anyone else having a similar problem?

Thanks,
Paul