Error Establishing Database Connection

How much memory do you actually have on the server? You’ve allocated 1118MB, a hair over a Gigabyte.

Is MySQL on the same server? If so how much memory does it have? Have you tried optimizing that database server? Are you caching requests, or connections, for example?

What do your logs say?

Have you tried any caching plugins?

URL?

We actually have unlimited memory on our server, but for some reason had to raise the memory up that much. I’m just curious, how did I allocate 1118MB.

Actually, MySQL is on the same server and we have unlimited memory for all of our resources, including PHP. I haven’t tried optimizing the database server yet. I have personally never done that before, do you know of any easy ways to go about this?

The logs are saying that the main server is taking up all the PHP memory allocation on our VPS, using most of our resources.

On all of the WordPress websites, I have W3 Total Cache installed and having them cache the websites this way.

An example URL would be readbuzz.com or the217.com

This is my second post on the WordPress support, so I apologize if anything isn’t clear.

I’m just curious, how did I allocate 1118MB.

Good question. I added 1024MB and 94MB, but that isn’t right. How did you allocate 94MB to a plugin? I am not 100% sure you can do that without changing the allocation for the whole PHP instance.

So, there is no way you have unlimited memory. It just isn’t possible. RAM is a physical thing. It can’t be ‘unlimited’. Also, you say that “the main server is taking up all the PHP memory allocation on our VPS, using most of our resources”. How can the main server take up all of “unlimited”, or how can it use most of “unlimited”? Something is wrong there.

Do you have terminal access to the server? If so, type free -m and tell me what it says.

Also, please look at Apache’s error log specifically and see if it reveals any problems with particular requests.

For MySQL, get tuning-primer.sh and mysqltuner.pl and try to make them happy. And search MySQL optimization. You can probably squeeze 2 or 3 tenths of a second off load time, and maybe solve some memory issues. At least you will know what is going on.

Hmmm… your readbuzz site is loading an enormous number of resources– 119. That is going to be hard on any server. You definitely need to optimize that as much as possible.

I had one of our developers go into the PHP code for that particular plugin and created an ini_set() function for the plugin to make it 94M.

And to be honest, I didn’t understand that myself. Supposedly, I do have terminal access using SSH/Shell but can’t find it. I don’t know why I always get them mixed up, but we have unlimited PHP and mySQL space, but only have 155GB of disk space and 3GB of memory.

As of now, I tried looking in our error logs and can’t find any particular problems with it. I’m going through our server’s tech support to see if I can find it or get access to it.

Okay I will definitely try searching for the mySQL optimization and installing those. My question is, I’ve never done anything in particular like this before, how would I go about installing those particular files onto our mySQL databases?

I didn’t know if this made a difference either, but our PHP version is 5.2.17 and our mySQL is 5.1.65.

… but we have unlimited PHP and mySQL space, but only have 155GB of disk space and 3GB of memory

Well, that is getting interesting. I am not sure how that works.

You don’t install those tuning scripts onto mysql at all. One is a shell script and one is a perl script. You just put them on the server– your home directory is fine– and run them. They will ask for MySQL connection credentials.

I’m not sure how that works as well.

I’m going to give this a try and then post what I have going from there.

Sorry for the delay in reply, but it seemed that somehow, our remote server gave a few errors in the error report. The errors given had to do with robots searching throughout all of our pages.

We simply had to place robots.txt within all of our WordPress websites and that seemed to solve the problem. ??