Wordpress "Error establishing a database connection"

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Haus of Tech Support > Wordpress "Error establishing a database connection"

beepsandboops: Jan 28, 2014

Problem description: I'm trying to help out a friend with a website, which wasn't set up by either me nor them. It's a WordPress site running on Ubuntu 14.04, and it regularly just shits the bed and throws up a "Error establishing a database connection" message on the site.

Attempted fixes: Rebooting doesn't help

Checked system resources with top, nothing seems to be running out of control

The wp-admin page is showing the same error message, so I don't think that that DB is corrupted or anything.

All of the MySQL logs are empty, and the Apache logs seem okay.

I checked wp-config.php and it seems like it has all of the right info to connect to the DB. Is there any way to verify what credentials I need to be using there?

Recent changes: Nothing that I know of

--

Operating system: Ubuntu 14.04

System specs: VPS hosted by DigitalOcean, I believe 1 GB RAM

Location: USA

I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes

# ¿ Jul 7, 2016 01:56

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 04:27

beepsandboops: Jan 28, 2014

Thanks for the exhaustive reply! Feeling a bit stupid, b/c it just looks like mysql wasn't running. I started it up and ran the command you recommended to have it automatically start up again.

I'll keep an eye on it but hopefully that was it! Thanks again

# ¿ Jul 9, 2016 20:21

beepsandboops: Jan 28, 2014

OK, site worked for maybe a day before crashing again. If I'm reading everything right, it looks like the box is running out of memory and making GBS threads the bed.

I checked /var/log/mysql/error.log and this is what I see:

code:

160710  8:42:25 [Warning] Using unique option prefix myisam-recover instead of myisam-recover-options is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use the full name instead.
160710  8:42:25 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
160710  8:42:25 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
160710  8:42:25 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins
160710  8:42:25 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.8
160710  8:42:25 InnoDB: Using Linux native AIO
160710  8:42:26 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M
InnoDB: mmap(137363456 bytes) failed; errno 12
160710  8:42:26 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
160710  8:42:26 InnoDB: Fatal error: cannot allocate memory for the buffer pool
160710  8:42:26 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' init function returned error.
160710  8:42:26 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed.
160710  8:42:26 [ERROR] Unknown/unsupported storage engine: InnoDB
160710  8:42:26 [ERROR] Aborting

160710  8:42:26 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Shutdown complete

When I check htop, this is what I see (sorting by memory)

The machine only has 1GB of memory, but for a small website that doesn't get much traffic I wouldn't think that would matter too much

Is there some obvious Apache setting that I'm missing that would stop it from launching a ton of processes?

# ¿ Jul 10, 2016 16:55

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