The database gods are laughing at me. This time, the mysql database for my blog fell over. Died. Unresponsive. It was an ex-database. Pining, as it were, for the fjords.
The blog dropped offline for an hour or so, and when it eventually came back, there were all kinds of scary database error messages being spewed into the log. I took a closer look, and the Drupal "cache" table was wedged and corrupted. Thankfully, it's just a cache, so I nuked the table and recreated it fresh. Easy peasy. I've got lots of backup snapshots, so it would have been almost as easy to restore any other table, but with the potential of lost content (posts and/or comments).
It looks like everything is back up again. Poking around the admin side of the blog, it looks like there was another nasty evil spam attack this morning, with 99% of it blocked by spam.module, but some actually got through. No idea if the database crash was related to the spam attack.
Update: Nope. It wasn't that simple. Now I'm getting the MySQL "Lost connection to MySQL server during query" error again. Crap. And phpMyAdmin is locking me out. Hopefully, that just means Dreamhost is working on the database from the other side. I'll try to stay away for awhile. Dangit.
Update 2: It's back up, and feeling much more responsive. I've tweaked the throttle settings, which disable some of the more database-intensive sidebar blocks when lots of users hit the site. The throttle has already been thrown, with 257 simultaneous users (256 of them anonymous). Hopefully that will help prevent the database from wedging again.