One Mans Blog
Specialization is for Insects.
Posted on Oct 31, 2007 - 2:18am by John P. in Site Updates
Thanks once again to my good friend Roy Kaldung for yet again saving our ass and keeping One Man’s Blog alive and kicking!
Several of you guys sent me e-mails today notifying me that OMB was down for much of the day. Unfortunately I was tied up for most of the day, but when I did get free I spent a few hours trying to determine what the problem was. Of course, I wasn’t making much progress…
Well, bright and early in Germany (like 6 am mind you!) Roy went to check on the OMB server, then IM’ed me when he noticed it was having issues. After about an hour of heavy duty trouble shooting he finally figured out that the culprit was actually the Dragon Design Sitemap Generator plugin I was using on the site.
After going through some rather technical troubleshooting steps involving watching every line of PHP execute until something broke, Roy noticed that there were 736,808 lines created with the prefix “ddsg”. It was pretty easy to figure out which plugin that was…
Next, he noticed that the 736,808 rows in the table were marked with the option autoload, but the server simply didn’t have enough memory to handle all of that. Now, this plugin has been on the site for a long time, but I guess we’ve only just gotten to the breaking point where it began causing real issues.
The fix involved simply disabling the plugin and then updated the table and setting all these entries to autoload='no'. Although I like this plugin, it took down my entire server multiple times and was getting progressively worse until Roy caught the problem, so unfortunately I won’t be able to re-install it.
It’s almost 2:30am and I wanted to share this with everyone that was concerned before I head off to sleep, so please join me in thanking Roy for taking his morning to troubleshoot this issue for us so that we can continue life as we know it. (That is for those of you who even noticed that OMB was unavailable in the first place!)
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I use the "No Adverts for Friends" plugin by Donncha O Caoimh
Autoload? I’ve never heard of the autoload option for MySQL. I mean, i can imagine what it would do, but I’ve not encountered it (not as if I’m all knowledgeable about MySQL or anything, though).
In any case, glad that you (or rather Roy) figured it out and are back up and running now.
It’s not an autoload function of MySQL, it is the field autoload from the table wp_options of WordPress. This field has an enum type with the possible values yes and no and defines if this option will be automatically loaded by WordPress on each request and can be immediatly accessed by the get_option() function.
Thanks for the info, Roy. I only know a little of the WordPress core (probably only enough to make hacks or a theme). Are you very familiar with WordPress? (It seems like it.)
It seems only that I’m familiar with WordPress, I just stepped into the code to fix the problem.
I’m more involved in programming PHP, databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Linux servers.
Wow I use this on all my blogs and know the guy that wrote it (used to play unreal tournament with him) indirectly.. I’ll keep my eye on mine.
Glad you’re back up and running … if the great OMB can go down none of us WordPress bloggers is safe! I guess this is a good lesson to learn: don’t overload yourself with plugins … thanks for helping me pare down the ones I was using
Notice? Uh…yeah! I kept trying all day Tues, and never could get in, and then yesterday, I tried once or twice, but, was too busy to come back more than that. I was thinking …’That’s it - John’s left the net, he got sick of it, our little community is over.’ Hahaha! My mind always goes ‘worst case scenario’ - it’s my good Catholic upbringing and being a mom of three monsters! Well, I guess Catholicism only did the guilt thing on me, not really the worrying - hmm….
I’ve heard of sites having trouble like this from the Google Sitemaps plugin, too! That’s it - no sitemaps plugins for me!
hehe. You’re funny. Don’t forget, I’ve been on the net in full force since about 1996, so the only way I’m getting off is if I die!
So when you see issues like this just be aware that it has to do with the fact that my personal blog is growing with the kind of vorocity that normally a business would deal with. So the shoestring budget I’ve allocated to it is bound to slip up sometimes.
John
I love to see such dedication to the internet!
Sometimes, I really think it is my life-support system! Well, since leaving Dallas, it actually is!
Thanks Roy to fix the problem, I was just about writing a mail, after my monthly shower, when I gave it a reload try and OMB was back…
Cheers and a great month to all
Rhoody
Good to see the site back up.
I could see the threads in my reader, but when I clicked the link, all was white.