Site down, "too many connections"

[AnotherAndrew]

My site suddenly went down. I haven't changed anything in days. I'm getting this message:

Fatal error: Exception: DB connect error 1040 - Too many connections (in /home/vg005web07/01/12/1031201/web/wire/core/ProcessWire.php line 96) #0 /home/vg005web07/01/12/1031201/web/wire/core/ProcessWire.php(46): ProcessWire->load(Object(Config)) #1 /home/vg005web07/01/12/1031201/web/index.php(166): ProcessWire->__construct(Object(Config)) #2 {main} in /home/vg005web07/01/12/1031201/web/index.php on line 203

Does anyone know what this means?

[AnotherAndrew]

Weird. Now it is back up.

[WillyC]

Fatal error: Exception: DB connect error 1040 - Too many connections (in /home/vg005web07/01/12/1031201/web/wire/core/ProcessWire.php line 96) #0 

poplar guy must u.be 

mr.another

Weird. Now it is back up. 

part.of growning up.this  is

  a develper .need not theses things

[alan]

No idea what this is unless it's what it seems (too many people hitting your site at once?).

But I assume the ProCache module would avoid this happening as, I think, it means most people are served content without PHP or DB hits. I've no idea how it does it and like a high quality magic trick I am quite content never knowing I'm just glad it's excellent.

[ryan]

But I assume the ProCache module would avoid this happening as, I think, it means most people are served content without PHP or DB hits. I've no idea how it does it and like a high quality magic trick I am quite content never knowing   I'm just glad it's excellent.

This is true as the requests are delivered as static HTML files. So it doesn't touch the DB unless the request isn't cached. It is a great way to let your server handle a lot more traffic. But regardless of what caching is in place, if you start to see a "too many connections" message regularly, then it's time to talk to your web host to see if the amount of traffic you are getting would benefit from a higher-end hosting plan. There are also cases with some web hosts where the resources are simply oversold and you might see those kinds of MySQL error messages even if you aren't getting a lot of traffic. In those cases, it's a good idea to find a new web host. 

[AnotherAndrew]

I finally checked into this with my host and they claimed that I wasn't "closing the connections". Also apparently the account has enough SQL connections to support the traffic.

I don't understand. I'm not experiencing this on other hosts.

The only way I'm aware if this problem is through a service (binary canary) that tells me if the site is down. Could it be that their constant pings are pushing the connections over the limit?

[teppo]

I finally checked into this with my host and they claimed that I wasn't "closing the connections". Also apparently the account has enough SQL connections to support the traffic.

I don't understand. I'm not experiencing this on other hosts.

PHP handles closing connections automatically, so this shouldn't be a problem. According to one source this behavior could be a bit inconsistent between various PHP versions though -- which version of PHP is your host running?

The only way I'm aware if this problem is through a service (binary canary) that tells me if the site is down. Could it be that their constant pings are pushing the connections over the limit?

Depends on how they're pinging your site. Are they using HTTP or just checking if your machine replies from certain IP or..?

In the former case that could affect things a bit, although it still shouldn't make much of difference. If they're checking your site every minute or something like that you could still slow it down a bit. I'm not familiar with this particular service, but they'll probably have some way to decide the time between individual pings.. and if they don't, Pingdom is a very good and very configurable alternative