Question

If you work regularly with vBulletin, you’ve probably seen this type of error before.

Database error in vBulletin :

mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can’t connect to local MySQL server
through socket
‘/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock’ (2)
/home/detroit/public_html/blab/includes/class_core.php
on line 311

MySQL Error : Error Number :
Request Date : Tuesday, November 16th
2010 @ 10:57:57 AM Error Date :
Tuesday, November 16th 2010 @ 10:57:57
AM Script :
url_removed_to_avoid_spam_flagging
Referrer : IP Address :
xx.xx.xx.xxx Username : Classname : vB_Database MySQL
Version :

My question doesn’t regard the error itself, but rather its age.

Our team is receiving roughly 20-30 of these each hour, with the e-mails arriving in a cluster between the third and seventh minute of the hour. The weird thing is that all of the errors appear to be from the same five-minute block from this morning.

I’m grepping for the errors themselves, but in case someone has a faster answer here (since grep is slow and I don’t see any localized PHP error files at a glance): Is there an easy way to see these errors in real time?

My fear is that, far from solving our database problem, we’ve simply generated so many errors that an e-mail filter somewhere along the messages’ route is embargoing the error messages, dribbling them out so slowly as to be useless. A real-time view of the errors will allow us to know whether we’ve actually got a handle on things, (as we think we do — in which case we can then look for a way to stop the dribble of old error messages) or whether we need to take additional action.

Thanks in advance for any comments on this. You people rock.

Answer 1

You probably have fixed this problem by now but:

1. Any time I’ve seen weird timestamps on vBulletin mails it has been due to throttling by e-mail providers. If you have a look at the timestamps on the Received: lines in the headers of the mails you’ll probably see where the throttling is happening.
2. If you’re getting clusters of errors at specific times, then the best place to start looking for culprits is the vBulletin “Scheduled Tasks” section of the Admin Control Panel. Some of the scheduled tasks can be expensive, depending on your site size, traffic profile, etc and one of them may be running an expensive query which might be locking a table or two for a very long time.
3. Have you tried looking at the DB using mtop at the times when the errors occur?