[Mediawiki-l] Exceeding max_questions resource from a wiki

[Michelle]

Our ISP-served wiki (running MediaWiki 1.3.11) went down due to this 
error:

SQL error: User 'our_wiki' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource 
(current value: 50000)

The ISP support assured me we did indeed exceed 50K 
questions/connections in one hour, and that this went on for over 12 
hours until they increased our limit to 80K questions/hour.

Is this an expected level of database connections for a wiki with 1500 
articles and about 400 visitors/day?

Would the number of connection requests be any lower using release 
1.4.x?

The ISP suggested we create a second db user and change the code to 
switch between them for accesses so that we avoid hitting the limit.  I 
guess this would mean changing Database.php but it seems very kludgy.  
Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.

Michelle