vBulletin Crashing Database each morning

[hilaryl]

Hi Everyone,

I'm going to try and be descriptive as possible, and hopefully get some help with a big issue we are having. We run a fairly big forum, 120,000+ users with over 7 million posts.

We currently are running vBulletin 4.1.2, and it's been running fine. Yesterday morning when trying to access the website, we got a database connection error. This essentially locked us out of accessing anything, when I try to log into phpmyadmin, I get the 'max-user-connections' message. So we had to get our host to restart the sql server.

After doing so, we were able to get back in to phpmyadmin, and could see that the 'searchcore_text' table was marked as crashed and needed to be repaired. The table is 3.6GB in size, so the repair took a very long time.

After repairing, the table no longer had the error on it, but the 'threadviews' table now was saying 'in use'. However there were no processes running on it - we thought it was a false positive.

After coming back in this morning, the website was saying database connection error again and our host is repairing the table again I believe.

Both times, the site seemed to go down around the 4am area.

I'm not sure what our best course of action is, the table is repairing, and saying it's fixed, but then we get database connection error again.

It's almost as if something is running at a specific time in the morning that locks a table, and then there's a massive build of queries trying to access that table, and that causes the connections to become overloaded and everything just shuts down.

What kind of query could be causing this though?

Please let me know what other information you need, we really need to get this sorted.

Thanks,
hilaryl