Wordpress Error Establishing Database Connection

19 Jul 2014

So I encountered this error when I tried to login to /wp-admin, I encounter this error

Error establishing a database connection

Well, luckily for me.. I had W3 Total Cache installed for my site. Hence the public area for the site are all cached and doesn’t look any different. Only the wordpress editors couln’t login to mysql.

Hence I SSH-ed into the droplet to troubleshoot the error.

So I checked if mysql was running

service mysql status

it returned

stop: Unknown instance:

So I ran

service mysql start

So it got me jumpy and I went on to isstall BackupBuddy for my client to do a full-backup on the site in case this error occurs too often and I decide to change host.

To my horror, BackupBuddy wasn’t able to do a backup! My guess was that the LAMP stack was eating up too much memory, so I went around searching for an answer.

oh god, why

I searched online and found a thread on reddit regarding the performance for 1 clikc install wordpress on digital ocean’s ubuntu 14.01 droplet.

reddit comments

It said to add swap on your droplet to solve the problems so I decided to give it a try!

I followed this tutorial.

After which, I tried to do another time do do a full backup and to my amazement, I was able to do it in less then 30 seconds!

So yeah. If you are facing a similar problem.. I hope this post helped. :)