Seafile 13 Docker Compose intermittently shows “Page unavailable” / fails to connect to DB

Seafile Server
1

Hi again ;),

I am running Seafile 13 with Docker Compose using these services:

  • seafile
  • db (MariaDB)
  • redis
  • notification-server
  • seadoc
  • md-server

Problem

From time to time, the web UI becomes extremely slow and then shows errors like:

  • “Page unavailable”
  • “Sorry, but the requested page is unavailable due to a server hiccup…”

At the same time, md-server logs show messages such as:

  • ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to server on 'seafile.mysql' (115)
  • WARNING Database initialization failed on attempt 1

Sometimes it recovers on its own after a few retries. However, if it remains in this problematic state, it does not recover by itself later even when the DB should already be ready. In those cases, I have to restart the containers manually.

Frequency

This only happens occasionally, maybe once every 2-3 months.
The same issue already occurred with Seafile v12, so it does not seem to be new in v13.

Workaround

What works for me is the following manual recovery sequence:

  1. Stop all containers manually
  2. Start only the database container first
  3. Wait a bit until MariaDB is fully ready
  4. Start the remaining containers

After that, everything works normally again.

A full recreate also works:

docker compose down
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d --force-recreate

My assumption

My guess is that this may be a startup or readiness issue:

  • depends_on only controls container start order, not actual service readiness
  • md-server may try to connect before MySQL/MariaDB is fully accepting connections
  • if startup enters this bad state, it seems not to recover automatically later even after the DB is ready
  • once the services are started again with the DB already ready, the stack works normally

Questions

Could you please confirm:

  • Is there a recommended way to make sure md-server and seafile waits until the DB is actually ready?
  • Is this a known issue startup timing or DB retry behavior?
  • Is there any official healthcheck or wait-for-db approach recommended for Seafile Docker Compose deployments?

Thanks a lot.

2

Thanks for reporting the issue. We will check the problem soon.

3

Thanks for reporting the issue. We were unable to reproduce this issue locally. The standard YAML file already includes health checks and service dependency settings. You may refer to the official documentation and deploy the latest version of Seafile.