I have a backup cron job job running at from 1 to 2 AM, to avoid affecting the server during the day.
I'll look into cron jobs
Max connection is 100
I've also have the logs from 2 sites of the last sql crash of this morning, you can look at there here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5725048/hmseb.txt
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5725048/pinuts.txt