Graham Stoney

That’s interesting @tedandtom. I was using MailPoet almost exclusively for the automated post feature, so maybe that’s why I hit this all the time. I really hope they address it because MailChimp’s RSS-based equivalent isn’t anywhere near as customisable or appealing as MailPoet’s.

Thanks for getting back to me Elvira. Since disabling MailPoet on my sites and migrating to MailChimp, I haven’t had any problems with intermittent database connection requests.

I like MailPoet, but making multiple concurrent database connection requests is a significant architectural flaw which caused outages on my sites and it wasn’t easy to track the cause back to MailPoet. Your other users may not realise that MailPoet is the cause when they experience intermittent database connection errors. The hosting company is likely to simply recommend upgrading to a more expensive plan which probably resolves the issue, so users are unlikely to report it to you.

My conclusion is that MailPoet in its current form simply isn’t compatible with low cost hosting plans like Hostgator’s Baby plan and BlueHost’s Basic plan.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Graham Stoney.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Graham Stoney.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Graham Stoney.

Thanks for your suggestions Elvira. I contacted HostGator tech support and they suggested upgrading to a VPS plan which has no MySQL connection limit; but it’s more expensive and that would be unnecessary if MailPoet was only using a single MySQL connection at a time.

They increased these settings, as suggested in:
https://haydenjames.io/mysql-server-has-gone-away-error-solutions/
default_socket_timeout=90
max_execution_time = 90
max_input_time = 90

I’ll let you know if I still see the problem.

Do the developers test MailPoet on shared hosting plans with HostGator and BlueHost? I can’t be the only person running the plugin on these popular hosts.

I’ve switched one of my sites to MailChimp as a workaround to verify that MailPoet really is the cause of the intermittent database connection errors.

Just got the General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away again too. This looks like a pretty nasty reliability issue. Any idea when you’ll be tackling it?

Here’s the bad news: I’m still getting the error “MailPoet Error: Unable to connect to the database” in the WordPress backend even after applying the settings in the article How to Fix General Error: 2006 MySQL Server has Gone Away. Looks like something is still maxxing out the concurrent database connections, and I suspect that something is MailPoet.

Thanks for answering my question Elvira. I’m imagining that this would cause each WordPress+MailPoet process to consume 2 database connections; but this is still far short of the 25 limit. Is it possible that either one could be kicking off multiple concurrent processes in the background of the WordPress dashboard that consume even more, perhaps as a wp_cron task or something?

Thanks for your response Bruna.
I contacted HostGator support and they added these settings to my php.ini, because I can’t edit my.cnf:
wait_timeout=28800
innodb_file_size=128M
max_allowed_packet=128M
I re-enabled the plugin, and will report back if I still get the intermittent database connection errors.
I’m still curious why MailPoet is opening its own database connection rather than using $wpdb to access the database using the existing WordPress MySQL connection?

Thanks Jeffrey. I’ve seen plugins with “Import settings from…” buttons in their settings to import settings from competing plugins; I think that would do.

Any chance of getting this built in to the plugin? I know the ProfilePress debacle isn’t your fault but it sure would be good to have this happen automatically. Thanks, Graham

Hi Vytis,
Thanks for getting back to me. I realised since asking my question that the ability to select a primary category is a feature added by Yoast SEO. Maybe this should be a core feature but it would still be nice if the category archives displayed the primary category.
Thanks,
Graham

Well sure, I can start hacking CSS but it’s not clear to me how to change every instance of text on my site to solid black, including the headers, footers, widgets etc. Why isn’t there a slider for the text colour, given that there are sliders for the background color and the accent color? This seems like an obvious omission.

Thank you for your quick response Jeroen, and for confirming that I’m not going crazy. I checked for plugin conflicts, but it turned out I had used a .bmp file in that post, which isn’t supported by OpenGraph. I’m guessing Yoast SEO only outputs og:image tags for supported image types. I’ve replaced it with a .png and it now works.

Thanks again,
Graham

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Graham Stoney.

Thanks Marko!

Thanks Marko. Well that makes a bit more sense then; but the message appears on the Plugins page, which is where I first noticed it. It doesn’t seem to appear elsewhere outside of W3 Total Cache that I’ve noticed.

Thanks simshaun! I really appreciate having your plugin.