Manual:DBError.php

From mediawiki.org

DBConnectionError[edit]

This is the infamous error:

Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.

If you see this, the database is very unhappy, but at least MediaWiki is still alive and knows about it.

Cannot connect to database[edit]

I haven't solved this for myself yet, but you should look into it following the same way I did.

  1. Check out the apache2 error log. If you're on ubuntu this was at "/var/log/apache2/error.log" by default when I wrote this.
  2. In my case, I got the following error .... "MySQL server has gone away in" .... followed by .... Error reading result set's header in ......
  3. This was supposedly caused by connection problems. Search those two terms and you should see several different places where people address it. Good luck!