Post-installation seemed as good a place as any -- I'd like to start a thread about how to debug a broken drupal ... because I just broke mine in a wildly intangible way that's driving me nuts.
A first line of defense is usually the devel.module where you can list the db queries, get timing info and page build time; this bug occurs sometime before that because the only db activity I can detect is this very cryptic message in the watchdog (which I have to read via MySQL)
Here's what I have: Half a dozen drupal sites working off the same code, more or less the same mix of modules. One of them times out returning any pages, and watchdog says only
Lost connection to MySQL server during query
query: UPDATE lions_sessions SET uid = 2, hostname = '207.61.5.143', session = 'messages|N;', timestamp = 1097880724 WHERE sid = '454eb49cdf24eca346e849726ae4e22c' in /opt2/home3/teledyn/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 125.
which probably means nothing.
Ok, so that's the problem, sort of. The only other symptom is that this page times out no matter what page you try to hit, and always only this one db_prefix blog, never the others. At the time it started to fail I was doing trivial edits like setting the secondary menu. it could be a data table corruption but I did do a mysql repair-table on them and got no errors reported.