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Error establishing a database connection (WordPress)

Posted on May 25, 2014

Hi there,

I’m having a really hard time figuring this out… My website shows up “Error establishing a database connection” on occasion. This happens about once a day. As soon as I reboot the droplet, the problem’s gone.

I’ve tried adding the following 2 lines in my wp-config file, as suggested on some other forums, but it didn’t work:

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’); define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);

From what I read around the web, it seems that 512mb of RAM is perfectly fine for a wordpress multisite, if set correctly - though I’m having a hard time with a single (low content) site, without many plugins. I’ve also disabled/deleted the plugins that could potentially eat up a lot of memory, such as wp-backup.

If you have any suggestions for me, I’d be more than thankful! Please notice that I’m pretty new with all this, and as it’s my first time running VPS, I do have a bit hard time understanding how everything works, at the moment…



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I Have done all of these things; spoke to support who kindly suggested it ; and i am STILL getting this issue. I am thinking about leaving DO because this is a business I am running and random error establishing a connection shouldn’t be happening, especially if I go to sleep and find out at 1AM it went down and didn’t find out until I got up at 7AM! This has been going on for now three months. I also upgraded and I STILL have the issue. Please DO , fix it, I have tried on my end and it is STILL happening. I am frustrated about it. I have opened a support ticket and sill no fix.

Problem solve with this code… Very simple :)

sudo start mysql

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