Question
Site shows "Error establishing a database connection"
- Posted on June 9, 2019
- Ubuntu 18.04WordPress
Asked by Arun Sathiya
My WordPress site had been fine all along, but roughly 36 hours ago, I noticed that it doesn’t load the site but shows Error establishing a database connection instead.
I certainly have not made any changes to the WordPress site itself, or my droplet settings recently.
What might have caused this? Thanks for any advise!
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@arunsathiya
If the error was at random, I would recommend checking the MySQL error log to see if there was a crash. The command below will output the last 50 lines from the MySQL error log.
If you see lines with
Out of memoryorKilled process, MySQL is unable to allocate the RAM it needs to continue to run and the OOM killer is killing off the process.There are a few ways to resolve this
Caching can help reduce resource usage by caching commonly requested data which, in turn, reduces the number of database calls that need to be made. It can be highly effective when combined with MySQL Tuner and general optimization.
Resizing is really the final recommendation when you’ve reached the point where you’ve enabled caching, optimized your configuration the best you can, and you still can’t get the resource usage under control (i.e. you just need more RAM).
Maybe there was a locked table and you reached your MySQL max connections limit or the droplet ran out of memory and MySQL got killed. Were you able to check if MySQL was running and could you check your connections?
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