Error in establishing database connection when high traffic

What’s the URL? and who’s your host?

WordPress Version 3.5.1

https://www.feu.edu.ph website hosted here in a server within our office

That error, and when you’re getting it, means that either your database server can’t handle the high-traffic load, or that the connection between your web and database servers can’t handle the high-traffic load.

There are a couple of things that can help. Frist is caching, second is query optimisation, and third is upgrading the hardware that you’re using.

The website runs normally during off-peak days and crashes when there is high peak load (error in establishing database connection) when high traffic.

The symptom may also very well sum up the cause of the issue in this case. It might be worth the time to ask your IT department to review the server logs and see where the bottleneck is happening. It may be a case of allocated resources being at capacity for that particular site/server. From your description, it seems unlikely that WordPress itself would be the first suspect.

[edit] What @catacaustic said ??

is it possible to just create a splash page that will get all the traffic that will go to the wordpress website?

I’m a newbie with this.. I’m not a real web developer, I’m a Database Analyst and they are letting me solve the problem because they feel that WordPress is the problem. :3

It is possible to create a splash page otuside of WordPress, but this will only handle the home-page loadings, so when people click through to another section/page it will most likely still have the same loading issues if people are still going to the inner pages the same way.

The key to this is the same as every other type of debugging. You have to work in stages and work through the areas that could be wrong in order to find where the issue is. First step is to look at the database logs and slow queries to see what issues are there. From there look at the server running the database itself, then look at the connection between the database server and the web server. After that check the web servers logs.

Seeing as how you’re a database analyist, then you should be able to trouble-shoot the database itself without any issues. The rest might need the help of a sys-admin to get the details out of the server logs.

I’ve deleted post revisions accumulating in the wp database.

it crashes during high traffic as the website is the front towards the student’s portal, housed in another server and a lot of students are accessing the website while waiting for their grades

If they are onyl going to one URL then yes you can use a splash page. That still doesn’t get you any closer to finding out why the problem is happening in the first place. As I said before this should be pretty simple to figure out if you can work with a server admin to get all of the information that’s available. ??

thank you @catacaustic