Hello Monks, Occasionally my users get errors when they are trying to use my application when database connections are exhausted. It happens infrequently enough that I want to trap the error and try to open the DB again. For some reason I get the old "Internal Server Error". Inside the Apache error log I get the appropriate error - Can't connect to MySQL server on <ipaddress>:<port>. Before you see the code, I have two points. First, if on the DBI->connect I put

DBI->connect(....) || fatal(error message)
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the fatal piece is invoked, with the code below, I get the "Internal Server Error". Second, fatal is a custom error routine that emails me and puts a nice message up for the user. I only want that error to show up after I have tried a few times. Here is the code:

sub openDB {
    my ($database, $user_id, $password) = ();

    open( CFG, $db_cfg ) or fatal("Cannot open databse config file.");
    ($database, $user_id, $password, $pwkey) = split( ',', <CFG>);
    $done = 0;
    $num_tries = 0;
    while (!$done) {
        $num_tries += 1;

        #  If we exceeded the custom amount of attempts call error rou
+tine
        if ($num_tries > 4) {
            fatal (" Could not open database: $DBI::errstr");
            $done = 1;
        }
        else {

            #  Make the database connection
            eval {
                $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:$database:<ipaddress:po
+rt>", $user_id, $password);
            }

            #  If there is an error try again
            if ($@) {
                next;
            }

            #  No error drop out of loop
            else {
                $done = 1;
            }
        }
    }
}
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Thanks in advance for your suggestions