Dying on two 'status' and 'select'.

[Jesse Brown]

Hello folks. I am running MySQL 3.22.27 on a Linux 2.2.13 SMP box (Pentium
120 x 2) with Slackware 4.0.

We run a number of scripts through crontabs that check data in the
database, and perform syncing functions, etc.

A week ago, I setup MRTG to gather SQL stats by writing a simple perl
script that contacts the DB, does a 'show status' and parses the output
(it shows queries/M, uptime, etc). 

Since then, whenever it and a another script that does about 4000 selects
against a relativly small datafile run at the same time, the server dies!
I don't get any error messages in my .err file, I just see it saying '0
servers' and restarting. 

Any ideas?