General Error?

[Lunick]

Every second or so click on the forum gives me the following error:


General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Too many connections [1040]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.


What's up?

[MrFlibble]

Errors like this happen sometimes. This seems to be related to website traffic but I'm no programmer so I can't tell for sure.

Too many connections [1040]

I guess this is the reason (again I'm not a specialist in this area!). Usually when a forum starts to slow down or goes offline I just wait for half an hour or more, and the problem disappears.

[Lunick]

Hmm, well I haven't had the error before that's all :/

[MrFlibble]

Does it persist as of now?

[Lunick]

I haven't had it today, maybe it was just a minor hiccup.

[DOSGuy]

Yeah, I'm getting pretty tired of seeing that error in the error logs. When I first purchased hosting from HostGator, they were more than able to handle the traffic we were getting. Things still seemed pretty smooth, even after traffic tripled, but a few months ago they reduced the resources available to shared hosting accounts (even though they deny it) and we're now getting errors like those, even though daily traffic dropped more than 50% from peak, and even though I've spent the last few months reducing the number of database queries and HTTP requests and optimizing the hell out of the site to reduce the load on their servers. With those changes, daily traffic has recovered from ~1500 to ~2500, but I don't think we can support 3000-4000 visitors per day any more. We need to move to better hosting, and I fear it may require expensive Virtual Private Server hosting.

[DOSGuy]

HostGator upgraded the server that RGB is hosted on a few months ago, and I'm not seeing that error message any more. Daily traffic is back in the 3000-4000 range, and we handled over 8000 visitors on June 3 without generating any errors. Hopefully this won't be a problem again.