If you have problems with performance under heavy load, try using the --skip-thread-priority option to mysqld. This runs all threads with the same priority. On Mac OS X, this gives better performance, at least until Apple fixes its thread scheduler.

The connection times (wait_timeout, interactive_timeout and net_read_timeout) values are not honored.

This is probably a signal handling problem in the thread library where the signal doesn't break a pending read and we hope that a future update to the thread libraries will fix this.