Connection problems

[JAM]

What's wrong with forum? Sometimes it is unavilable

EDIT: like now

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

[Quietus]

I get that once or twice a week.  I normally just give it ten minutes and try again.

Sometimes it also slows to a crawl, but still works.

[Zhs2]

This is happening more frequently for some reason, and I've not been able to determine why. Our account for the site was even temporarily suspended due to high loads from what (I believe?) equated pretty much to a Denial of Service attack. As a countermeasure, I've loaded up even more blacklist plugins for those stupid bots to redirect to instead of costing server time; hopefully this doesn't result in another suspension, though it's very, VERY difficult to measure CPU usage with the tools provided by cPanel. I guess we'll act a bit more cautious from now on and watch the activity ratings.

EDIT: Operations feel slightly faster now, fortunately, but the connection to the database timing out happens sometimes. We'll keep on guard.