XF 2.3 Error rendering navigation: Too many connections

[Levina]

So I have a full page of server errors with "Too many connections".

We are a small forum and particularly at that time of (my) night, it's real quiet, not much traffic so not getting this. Unless it's caused by spambots?

Do I need to worry about this or can I just delete the errors and forget about it?



Copy/paste of a stack trace:

• XF\Db\Exception: Error rendering navigation: Too many connections
• src/XF/Db/Mysqli/Adapter.php:172
• Generated by: Unknown account
• 17 September 2025 at 04:02

Stack trace​

#0 src/XF/Db/Mysqli/Adapter.php(31): XF\Db\Mysqli\Adapter->makeConnection(Array)
#1 src/XF/Db/AbstractAdapter.php(62): XF\Db\Mysqli\Adapter->getConnection()
#2 src/XF/Db/Mysqli/Adapter.php(116): XF\Db\AbstractAdapter->connect()
#3 src/XF/Db/AbstractAdapter.php(518): XF\Db\Mysqli\Adapter->escapeString('node')
#4 src/XF/Mvc/Entity/Finder.php(912): XF\Db\AbstractAdapter->quote('node')
#5 src/XF/Mvc/Entity/Finder.php(672): XF\Mvc\Entity\Finder->join('Permissions|1', true, false, false)
#6 src/XF/Mvc/Entity/Manager.php(223): XF\Mvc\Entity\Finder->with(Array)
#7 src/XF/Navigation/NodeType.php(222): XF\Mvc\Entity\Manager->findByIds('XF\\Entity\\Node', Array, Array)
#8 src/XF/Navigation/NodeType.php(140): XF\Navigation\NodeType::loadPendingNodeData()
#9 internal_data/code_cache/navigation_cache.php(113): XF\Navigation\NodeType::displayNodeExtended(78, 'home')
#10 src/XF/Template/Templater.php(8170): XF\Pub\App->{closure}(Object(XF\Template\Templater), 'xfrm', Array)
#11 src/XF/Pub/App.php(625): XF\Template\Templater->renderNavigationClosure(Object(Closure), 'xfrm', Array)
#12 src/XF/Pub/App.php(576): XF\Pub\App->getNavigation(Array, 'xfrm')
#13 src/XF/App.php(2571): XF\Pub\App->renderPageHtml('

<div class="b...', Array, Object(XF\Mvc\Reply\Error), Object(XF\Mvc\Renderer\Html))
#14 src/XF/Mvc/Dispatcher.php(414): XF\App->renderPage('

<div class="b...', Object(XF\Mvc\Reply\Error), Object(XF\Mvc\Renderer\Html))
#15 src/XF/Mvc/Dispatcher.php(66): XF\Mvc\Dispatcher->render(Object(XF\Mvc\Reply\Error), 'html')
#16 src/XF/App.php(2824): XF\Mvc\Dispatcher->run()
#17 src/XF.php(806): XF\App->run()
#18 index.php(23): XF::runApp('XF\\Pub\\App')
#19 {main}

Request state​

array(4) {
["url"] => string(36) "/resources/gimp-tutorials.12/reviews"
["referrer"] => bool(false)
["_GET"] => array(1) {
["/resources/gimp-tutorials_12/reviews"] => string(0) ""
}
["_POST"] => array(0) {
}
}

 

[Levina]

Had these again today. Not sure why, just a few hundred guests.

 

[briansol]

If you're on shared hosting, you have limited resources most likely. bots can do that pretty easily.

max_connections is a setting, which you probably don't have access to on a shared host. If it's set to something like 50 and you get 51 connections, it will throw the error as it rejects the request.

You can try blocking the bots higher up (at dns) with a service like cloudflare before it hits your server or force a human check for some countries/etc if you're getting hit from certain areas.

 

[Levina]

If you're on shared hosting, you have limited resources most likely. bots can do that pretty easily.

max_connections is a setting, which you probably don't have access to on a shared host. If it's set to something like 50 and you get 51 connections, it will throw the error as it rejects the request.

You can try blocking the bots higher up (at dns) with a service like cloudflare before it hits your server or force a human check for some countries/etc if you're getting hit from certain areas.

We're on Cloud hosting and we weren't having many guests. It just throws out these errors every once in a while but when we had 5000 guests, that weren't guests at all, a while ago, we had none. So I don't know what causes them.