Database Error Connection Caused by Plugin

  • I have several sites that use WordPress as the CMS. Last night 3 of them went down reporting Database Error Connections. My web host support told me that it was caused by max_user_connections being exceeded. I had other sites that were not affected and 2 of these 3 sites have not previously had problems.

    It was also suggested that it could be due to a corrupt plugin, but I can’t find any plugins (and latest updates) that were not on the ‘good’ sites too. All sites are using WordPress 3.1.1. They went on to say:

    I have found this to be a very common issue over the last year or so with WordPress in which some plugin or possibly even a core component causes frequent corruption of the wp_options table (which is clearly odd since this table is very small with under 200 records most of the time).
    Once the wp_options table is corrupted, the MySQL server generally will attempt an automatic repair which just runs and runs non stop due to something odd in the table which it doesn’t seem able to resolve or correctly identify/report.
    When this is occurring, every future query to the wp_options table will queue up waiting for the table to be usable, thus leading to the max_user_connections being reached pretty quickly.

    I have only ever seen this behavior within WordPress and searching their forums or google will reveal tons of discussions of this type of issue, but unfortunately so far I have never found any solution beyond disabling plugins/components in WordPress until finding the one that causes it.

    This seems to be a very major issue which WordPress developers should be digging deeper into but so far I have seen no indication of investigation.

    This has only happened since the 3.1.1 upgrade and I’d really like some feedback from the wp community please.

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  • Have you tried:

    – deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).

    – switching to the Twenty Ten theme to rule out any theme-specific problems.

    – resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems.

    Thread Starter haizdesign

    (@haizdesign)

    Thanks esmi

    I’ve tried deactivating plugins, but not tried the other 2 options. Didn’t realise you can reset the plugins folder!

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