CPU Usage maxing out when using Admin Search

[strandoo]

Hi Folks. I've got a client with an e-commerce jewellery shop. She's been updating the prices a lot in the lasts week or so (price of silver!) but can only go about 30 minutes before the site crashes. I've had a look a the logs and see frequent "SQLSTATE[42000] [1203] User xxxxxx_admin already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections (/wire/core/WireDatabasePDO.php:556)" notices followed by "SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2006 Server has gone away (/wire/core/WireDatabasePDO.php:1000)" notices (the xxxxx_admin is the database admin account).

The site's been in use for about 5 years without issues, she uses the 'live search' feature in the PW backend (upper right corner) to jump from product to product by typing in the product_code (a field I had added via the PageSearch modules' config/settings). She said she often would type a PC like '41-PB-1001' and would often make mistakes, then backup to the second hyphen then that's when things would sometimes freeze. I've checked the cPanel when the site goes down and the CPU uses is always screaming at 99%/100%.

They get pretty good traffic on the site, so I've been hesitant to updated anything, but last week I updated php to 8.2, then today I brought PW up to 3.0.255 but it didn't fix it. I can't reproduce it easily, partly because I can't take the time to type searches for 20 or 30 minutes! Anyone ever seen this before?

Thanks.