oontsa yes, I can confirm that FreeFlarum was experiencing some MariaDB related issues this morning.
After lots of debugging, I was able to find out the culprit. It turns out that there could've been a larger amounts of requests made to fetch the forum directory on the main FreeFlarum website. As a result, I've made the quick decision to remove the forum directory altogether. I can't confirm whether this was a DDoS attack, but it's unlikely since the logs didn't indicate so.
The directory was a neat little feature made by me. However, I made it when my experience with Python wasn't as great as it is now - this means that the database queries weren't so optimized on the server-side. Plus, not many people were actually using it (and the audience just wasn't there either). Perhaps I will bring it back as a separate project, but that's unlikely since there already exist sites such as BuiltWithFlarum.com.
On the bright side, I've been able to optimize the MariaDB configuration, to allow for more simultaneous connections. The difference should be felt especially on larger forums (+1,000) posts. For example: a forum with +30,000 posts (wait, we have forums that are this big?) will now load in under 1.5 seconds on average, assuming that the server is not overloaded and not many extensions are enabled (I am not sure what were the numbers before, but this might possibly be a significant improvement).
As always, if your forum encounters any issue, please let me know. FreeFlarum does not monitor every single forum, and so it is not aware if an individual error happens. In case of a global issue (like this, where MariaDB crashed), I am notified immediately thanks to our new status monitor - but just message me anyways, to make sure.
