max connections ever possible in MySQL 5.1

[csshyamsundar]

Greetings.,

I'm planning to using Windows Server 2003 R2 deploy an PHP/MySQL application for a client.,

The Application is little heavy., the web frontend is served by PHP and an application frontend directly connects to MySQL server.

I have set max_connections variable to 5000.

There will be somewhere near 1500 users who use the MYSQL thro' an application., ( connections are persistent ). The rest for Web.

Realistically speaking I don't know., if the server would handle that load.

I wanted to know how much MySQL can actually handle efficiently without performance lag.,

Server Config: Xeon Class with 2 GiG RAM.,
LAN Config: all PC's in lan are connected by Gigabit LAN.

I read in dev.mysql that MySQL's performance depends on Thread Library., and Performance would really be nice in Linux with statically compiled binaries. Has anyone tested., in realtime., can MySQL scale to that level ?

Any advices ???