Posted on Oct 30, 2007 - 8:04pm by John P. in Site Updates
Hey, for all of you that have been trying to access the site today, sorry it’s been down for hours.
I hadn’t noticed because for the last couple of weeks I’ve been on a super-secret mission. Perhaps I’ll tell you guys what I’ve been up to in the next week or two…
Anyway, the server is obviously back up now, but I’m working on the root cause of why these things are happening. You know, all I want is a freakin server that will just stay up and running all the time! All I do is run this little blog, so why is that so hard to accomplish?!? The site is waaaayy too busy for a managed Virtual Private Server, and even though I bought a ginormous dedicated server that sucker is once again struggling to keep up with demand.
Grrr…
I use the "No Adverts for Friends" plugin by Donncha O Caoimh
I’ve been having so many problems in the last 24 hours, and I just don’t know why.
Something very strange that has happened twice in the last week or so is that WordPress has basically “reset” itself and blanked out. What causes this is the fact that it somehow forgets the base URL for the blog. You have to enter that on the Options page.
But even worse, my server and WP have been teaming up to make my life hell. I’ve got other blogs and sites running on this server just fine, but OMB keeps stopping even while they continue to run! Mindboggling!
Anyway, I’ll be keeping a closer eye on things and trying to make sure it’s running. Meanwhile I’m entertaining other options to try to stabilize things.
John
You can’t imagine how many eyes observing the server, especially the security.
The occured problem is identified and eliminated but not solved: In the table wp_options where more than 700.000 rows from one plugin with the value ‘yes’ in the field ‘autoload’. While processing each request WordPress loads all options from this table with the setting autoload=’yes’ to avoid unnecessary databases access. Due to this large number of rows PHP can’t consume more memory as defined in the php.ini and died. Settings all autoload fields of this one plugin to ‘no’ enabled us to running the blog without problems.
I had a beer-induced outage as well so I never noticed
Kim:)