[Mediawiki-l] Strange "Too Many Connections" Error

[Tim Starling]

Andrew n marshall wrote:
> I'm running a small, personal, rarely used MediaWiki site.  Actually, 
> two, off the same server and database.  Because of lack of PHP 5 support 
> at my host, I'm using MediaWiki 1.6.10.
> 
> Yesterday, one of the two wikis stop working, returning the following error:
>   WeddingWiki has a problem
>   Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.
>   Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.
>   (Can't contact the database server: Too many connections (10.1.1.12:3309))
> 
> Now, if this was really a database problem, then I would expect the 
> other wiki to give similar errors.
>   And phpMySQL should have stopped working as well.  But those work just 
> fine, and only one wiki is having problems.
> 
> Searching, I found two similar errors.  At wikipedia:
>   
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Troubleshooting#Too-Many_Connections_Problem
> is oriented toward contributors, and the error text doesn't quite match 
> anyway.
> 
> On this list, one other person mentioned the error back in Sept 2005, 
> but he was told to just fix his MySQL number of connections.  Again, 
> because this only happens in one instance of MediaWiki, I do not believe 
> the problem is in the database.

MediaWiki cannot generate this error by itself, the string "Too many
connections" is not present in the source tree. It always originates in
MySQL. Whether MediaWiki is partly to blame is another question. Various
suggestions for fixing it can be found at:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/too-many-connections.html

-- Tim Starling