SMF was unable to connect.... This may be caused by the server being busy

[PHIL_TC]

Established forum over a number of years, server has been upgraded.

Started getting this message every now and again :

"Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later"

Running on Windows server 2003 R2
Mysql
SMF 1.1.2

The forum can be running fine. Then users start seeing the above message. A restart of the WWW services and its fine again for a little while.

Then after a while the errors start again.

Sometimes if you press F5 to refresh the page the error goes away.

Very frustrating. Can anyone shed some light?

Thanks.

[Robert.]

Hey, welcome to SMF! First of all, I'd recommend updating to SMF 1.1.16 or 2.0.2, as 1.1.2 is outdated. And who is your host?

[PHIL_TC]

Hey, welcome to SMF! First of all, I'd recommend updating to SMF 1.1.16 or 2.0.2, as 1.1.2 is outdated. And who is your host?

Hey! Thank you and thanks for the quick response.

Host is hxxp:easyspace.com [nonactive]

How easy is the upgrade to the above versions? Can it be done whilst the forum is active?

[Robert.]

It's very easy to upgrade. It can be done while your forum is active, but that'll take some time. Do you have mods installed? If you don't have mods installed, check this out: http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Upgrading The large upgrade package just takes a few minutes and it upgrades your forum directly to 1.1.16, which is faster than small upgrades.

[PHIL_TC]

Thanks will pass this onto the hosting company.

In the mean time, is it possible to see the "real" error behind the "This may be caused by the server being busy", looking on other threads it mentions a "error.php" which shows the real error but I can't see that in the installation we currently have.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

You can look in your forum error log (should be somewhere in Admin -> Maintenance), but that's a server error.