Database connection error caused by WP Popular Posts

Hi

I would need some more details about your site to be sure (eg. number of posts, average daily visitors, etc.) but I bet the problem lies here:

SELECT p.ID AS id, p.post_title AS title, p.post_author AS uid FROM jmu_popularpostssummary v LEFT JOIN jmu_posts p ON v.postid = p.ID WHERE 1 = 1 AND p.post_type IN(‘post’, ‘page’) AND p.ID NOT IN(6513, 6655, 1579) AND v.view_datetime > DATE_SUB(‘2018-01-04 16:20:18’, INTERVAL 365 DAY) AND p.post_password = ” AND p.post_status = ‘publish’ GROUP BY v.postid ORDER BY SUM(v.pageviews) DESC LIMIT 20 OFFSET 0;

You’re having WPP try to retrieve an entire year of data from your database.

If:

• WPP has been running on your site for some time now,
• You have a lot of posts,
• You get a lot of visits everyday

… chances are your database server can’t handle that and crashes when your site is at its peak hours (specially if your site is on a shared hosting), which would explain the “database connection error” message you’re seeing sometimes.

So:

• If you want to keep your “best posts from the past year” list, make sure you cache the result so WPP doesn’t run such a heavy query so often. This doesn’t guarantee that your database server won’t suffer during peak hours but it should be a lot better.
• Install a caching plugin to reduce the load on your server.
• If your server has memcached installed and enabled and you’re using W3 Total Cache (or any other caching plugin that supports memcached), consider installing a memcached plugin to further improve the performance of your site.
• Read the Performance section from the wiki.

Hi Héctor,

Thanks for the valuable info. You are right – we have lots of posts and a large number of visits every day, and WPP has been running on our blog for almost 4 years.

I will try your advice and make sure to set WPP for best performance (i.e. enable caching, log limit, data sampling) and see how it goes.

Thanks again!

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by milos.kostadinovic.

Thanks for the valuable info. You are right – we have lots of posts and a large number of visits every day, and WPP has been running on our blog for almost 4 years.

Don’t mention it, and thanks for being such a loyal user ??

I will try your advice and make sure to set WPP for best performance (i.e. enable caching, log limit, data sampling) and see how it goes.

I recommend starting with the caching part only. Try the rest of the features if/when needed.

If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask ??