Strange error screen

[Striek]

I can't be the only one to get this, so I though I'd let y'all know. The first time I tried to post about this bug, I got the same error again. The error is:

Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /data/httpd1/htdocs/admin/db_mysql.php on line 40



There seems to have been a slight problem with the database.
Please try again by pressing the refresh button in your browser.
An E-Mail has been dispatched to our Technical Staff, who you can also contact if the problem persists.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

[MrLinus]

It's not that strange. It means that there are too many connections. I suspect -- given that its happened twice in 20 minutes -- someone is pounding the server. I've sent a note to the admins to give them a heads up and hopefully to look into it.

[Striek]

Make that three times... this is just pissing me off now.

[MrLinus]

Welcome to the world of a DoS... IMHO, there is no way the 75 people online could cause this. Someone is doing a simple resource starvation or there is some bad code somewhere.

Gotta have patience and a wait-n-see attitude.

[Striek]

I have plenty of paitience... even got into a competition with my cat once.

But that doesn't mean I can't get pissed while I wait-and-see

[pwaring]

It wouldn't be too difficult for someone on a broadband connection to hammer the DB with queries - just choose a page which requires lots of non-cached queries (a popular thread would be a good choice) and then run a simple multi-threaded HTTP client that requests that page continuously without caching the results. I'm pretty sure some pages on the site require 20+ queries, get a few people constantly requesting a few copies of those pages and you could overload the DB if there weren't any protections against such attacks.

[moxnix]

I got the same error, twice yesterday, when trying to log onto AO. I just went away and did something else for a while, and when I came back, I didn't have any problem?

[mnstrgrl]

We're aware of this (I can't exactly ignore 400+ error emails in my inbox). I dug through the logs some this morning and can't find any particular IP that's generating an unacceptible number of hits. I'll continue to search for the problem.

- h

[Tim_axe]

I just did a search that took very, very, VERY long to execute. I mean, seriously long to execute, and I had close to half a million results and 18,000 pages. I didn't see any errors like you did though, it just took forever to load. Could be a bad DoS...

I just did this search within the last 10 minutes, and it scared me as I was waiting for a while for the page to load, which since I'm on a highspeed link means the server was seriously under load. mnstrgrl - I'll PM you with info on this, it could be a bad resource hog. But it wasn't me last night, unless it was people trying to read the huge thread in GCC that caused it.

[mnstrgrl]

I've redirected user searches which don't include member info to the "please enter search terms" error page. That should help. I may redirect this to a different page, but I need some more info to decide which would be the best page to point to. Tim_axe - check my PM reply regarding this.

- h