mysql loosing connections on 5.4

[Pete French]

When port randomisation was added to 4.x I noticed that under heavy
loading my webservers starting dropping their connections to the
the mysql database. This was fixed by disabling port randomisation
and everything ran very happily.

When I upgraded to 5.4 I left port randomisation on, and everything
was fine until we started to get a very heavy load on the servers over
the last two days. So I disabled it, and the problem went away to a large
degree, but is still there occasionaly (i.e. I still see a few connections).

It's odd behavioour, but what makes it odder is that all these connections
are too a local mysql process, using a socket in /tmp! So quite how
port randomsiation should affect it I dont know.

Anybody else seen this ? I remember a few people had the same issue under
4.x, but I havent heard much about it since then.

-pcf.