I have been having a big issue for quite some time now. At completely random times, I get the "Error establishing a database connection" message only when browsing the forum on our website. All other areas of the website will never produce this message. It's only when browsing the forums and it's completely random as to when it happens.

I contacted our partners at RackSpace / Liquid Web and they said something along the lines of there are too many queries to the DB that are left open. We've been using Simple:Press for 5 years and for 4 years we didn't have a single problem but for the past year we have and it's getting worse.

Is there anything that you can suggest for us to resolve this? Have you had any reports of this before?
If you can offer any advice I would appreciate it.

Thank you.

I can definitely start by stating that no - we have no other such reports. And perhaps also adding that noting major has changed around the time-frame you mention.

I also do not know what 'too many queries to the DB that are left open' means.

It is obvious that a dynamic software application like a forum - especially one designed with the options and security/permissions inherent in SP - is going to make more DB queries than a simple, static entity like a blog.

Perhaps your host is throttling this DB activity and/or allowing too many websites to utilise the same MySQL DB engine. At least that is the only possibility that comes to mind. I will ask my colleague if he has any further ideas but this seems unlikely in such a unique issue as the one you raise.

I tried a few things yesterday to try and eliminate certain possibilities of outside interference. I cloned our forum to a sub domain and stripped away any and all plugins I could. I optimized the DB, I ran some of the cleanup tools within the forum and I am still having the issue.

https://forum.ohiowebtech.com/.....-plugin-1/
This is a new DB and I gutted out all the tables from any previous plugins as well.

We did make a switch from http to https about a year ago. Are there any known issues when making that switch? Any known issues with using CloudFlare?

We run over 100 websites on our hosts CloudSites platform without any issues so I'm relatively certain this isn't a hosting issue.

I am still having the same issue with the DB Connection. Are there any other tools that I can use to rebuild the Forums DB or turn off functions that are not needed? The issue only happens when I am browsing the forum.

Thank you.

as Andy said, no similar issues reported... and we have fair number of users on cloudflare,,, though as expected, CDN setups can be tricky...

have you changed something?  when I visit the link, quite a few issues outside db connection..  plus the page tries to tell me its a facebook page...  might be related to viewing as guest, but still, more at play it seems..