Support

As Dr. House said in TV series "Patients lie". His reasoning is that a patient will try to filter and explain their symptoms through the narrow lens of what they think they are suffering from. This is true for site owners who ask for assistance and yours is one of these cases. The database connection has nothing to do with your issues.

Admin Tools connects to the database through Joomla's database connection. In fact, we call \JFactory::getDbo() to get Joomla's database object and use it to connect to the database. Same for Akeeba Backup's interface.

The backup engine does pretty much the same. There's an internal class following the Decorator pattern and abstracts Joomla's database connection object which is to say that it merely passes everything back to Joomla's database connection object.

That is to say, your database connectivity is a red herring.

After running the Admin Tools Quick Setup Wizard you are resetting the Use IP Workarounds setting. If you have a load balancer in front of your EC2 instance OR if you are using Varnish, NginX or any other reverse proxy in front of Apache then you definitely need to enable this. Otherwise all requests will appear as coming from the same IP address. This will cause all requests to be reported as security exceptions and blocked which leads to increased database writes, a deliberate slow-down of permanently blocked IPs and that explains what you are seeing. It has nothing to do with the database connection (Amazon RDS for all intents and purposes to the outside world is a remote MySQL server, that's their unique selling point -- you can plug it in any existing application).

Regarding Akeeba Backup please file a new support ticket in the correct category and send us the log. I cannot address your issue based on what I already know is bad speculation rooted on an arbitrary and false premise.

When you say "localhost" do you mean that your site is running on your computer / laptop?

And no, Admin Tools does not listen to any port. It's not its own thing, it's a Joomla extension. Your web server listens to HTTP, it hands down the request to PHP which loads Joomla which handles the request and loads Admin Tools.

Sorry for the delay. I had to run some tests.

I have to ask exactly how you are connecting Joomla to Amazon RDS Aurora MySQL. Have you set up a default MySQL connection in PHP? If so, that explains what you see.

The only way I could reproduce your issue is misconfiguring my Aurora MySQL instance to prevent TCP/IP connections. If you used Amazon's new interface (default) for creating an Aurora MySQL instance then the security group it created doesn't allow inbound TCP/IP traffic on port 3306. This has some side-effects. It's quite complicated how it works, but because Joomla tries to disconnect and reconnect its database after we use it in our decorated class it ends up trying to use the credentials in configuration.php which might cause PHP to hang for 30" while the OS TCP/IP stack is trying in vain to contact the remote MySQL server. That matches exactly what you describe happening.

Editing the Security Group and adding a new Inbound rule for port 3306 and an appropriate source matching your EC2 deployment this issue goes away. In fact, you can even add an inbound rule with your IP as the source to connect to the RDS instance remotely.

Doing the latter I even managed to have a site on my computer connected to RDS. It's slow as molasses due to network latency but Admin Tools works great and Akeeba Backup takes a restorable backup perfectly, if very slowly.

So, it looks like the problem has to do with how you have configured your RDS instance. There is nothing on our side of the code which would prevent you from using Amazon RDS Aurora MySQL in lieu of MySQL proper.

I can tell you that it's definitely a configuration issue on the Amazon side of things. I have a site which connects to RDS and both Admin Tools and Akeeba Backup work reliably. I cannot tell you what could be the problem on Amazon's side because I neither have access to your AWS configuration nor is it under the scope of our support. My ability to help stops at determining that the issue is not down to a bug in our software. Sorry :(

If that doesn't work for you let me know and I'll try to set up the whole EC2 + RDS combination sometime tomorrow or over the weekend (I need to finish up some releases and some other work first).

No problem. Take your time. There was a magnitude 5.2 earthquake where I live earlier today. My day went a bit sideways to say the least. I don't think I'll have a realistic chance to run any tests over the weekend. Ping me when you are back from vacation if you have any ideas, I'll be interested to hear what exactly was going on.

Thank you! Be safe too. I saw the images from the aftermath of the quakes in California.