Strange error screen

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:

Quote:

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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