I was getting lots of errors after I upgraded to Drupal 6.13. The site was running a bit slow before then, but after the upgrade, it was breaking more and more.
If I tried to access the site, I got a Garland-themed Drupal error page saying:
Site off-line
The site is currently not available due to technical problems. Please try again later. Thank you for your understanding.
If you are the maintainer of this site, please check your database settings in the settings.php file and ensure that your hosting provider's database server is running. For more help, see the handbook, or contact your hosting provider.
The mysql error was: Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading authorization packet', system error: 0.
I had just visited that same page five minutes beforehand (after I upgraded), and it worked fine.
So, I opened a different browser (IE), tried going to the site root, and got an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error.
Checking the error logs from my website, I got lots of entries like this:
[Thu Jul 02 15:02:58 2009] [error] [client 96.237.0.45] Premature end of script headers: index.php, referer: http://www.EXAMPLE.com/
[Thu Jul 02 15:02:58 2009] [error] [client 96.237.0.45] File does not exist: /home/EXAMPLE/EXAMPLE.com/internal_error.html, referer: http://www.EXAMPLE.com/