Right now there's only around 5, but that's how it was most of the time before. It only massed tons of connections when there were a ton of queries waiting for a table lock to resolve. Generally when that happens, it'll get bad enough that our monitoring service will timeout a request, and I'll get an email, and that hasn't happened since I added the extra ram. It has gone a couple of days in the past without doing that before, so I'll continue to reserve judgement; that being said, it looks pretty good right now. We do have a bit of a lull in traffic compared to yesterday when we had the problems though. Still plenty of folks upset posting about the 5 hours of downtime yesterday
Just a followup comment on this whole process: After adding the additional RAM (quadrupling to 32GB), the slow query log has logged ZERO slow queries (notably, I cleared the slow query log while MySQL was running and this actually stopped the logging without me knowing for a few days until I turned it back on again), and we have had no complaints about the site running slow, and ZERO alert emails telling us the site wasn't accessible. It's pretty much a miracle. So for future folks reading this thread wondering why their vBulletin install isn't as speedy as it could be, and you think they've tried everything... Have you tried increasing the RAM so much that your entire database could fit into it a easily a few times? lol.