[pmwiki-users] Site not responding

[Shaney Crawford]

Hi,

I am not 100% sure, but it might have been a problem with the following recipe.

totalcounter_1_6.php

I have used totalcounter for a long time, though, and never had
problems with it, so I am not convinced that it is the real problem.

I'll give an account of what I did in case someone can come up with a
reasonable explanation.

------------

1.  I upgraded to the latest version of pmwiki (pmwiki-2.2.0-beta18)
on December 28.  I experienced no problems with the site from December
28 to January 3.

2.  In the morning of January 3, I was able to use the site normally.
I didn't change any of the settings, but I think I may have edited one
or two pages.  In the evening of January 3, I was unable to load the
site.  No pmwiki page would load, although regular .html pages would,
indicating that it was not a server outage.

3.  When the problem persisted on the morning of January 4, I emailed
the company that hosts the site to find out if they had changed any
settings on the server.  (I received a response  on the morning of
January 5 saying that they had not made any changes to the server and
that they could not reproduce the problem I was having.)

4.  On January 4, after receiving Daniel's suggestion to disable
recipes, I immediately deleted the following recipes from my cookbook.

atcontactform.php (a version of mailform.php that I had modified for
the Alien Times site)
captcha.php
searchhighlight_1_16.php
totalcounter_1_6.php

All of these recipes had been installed a long time back and had not
been tweaked on the day that the problem started.  I had not invoked
totalcounter in a long time and only one other person knew how to use
it (and she was on holiday, so I doubt she has used it recently
either).

In addition, atcontactform and captcha were not in use.  They appeared
in the config.php file but I had deleted the mailform that I had been
using on the site because I was getting too much spam (including
attachments -- but that is a story for another time).

5.  I then deleted all references to the recipes in config.php.

6.  Upon testing the site, it was able to load, but it was erratic in
the amount of time that it took to load.  Sometimes it would take more
than a minute for a page to load.  The site was still basically
unusable because of the load times.  However, I had to go to work, so
I was not able to spend any more time on figuring out what was causing
the lag.

7.  As the day went on, the load speeds improved.  By evening, the
site was back to normal.

8.  In the morning, I received the email from Patrick asking me which
recipe had caused the problem, so I reintroduced searchhighlight and
totalcounter together, and then one a time.  When they were both put
back, the page wouldn't load.  When only searchhighlight was used, the
page loaded.  When only totalcounter was reintroduced, the page
wouldn't load.

(By the way, I live in Japan, so if the timing doesn't match your
perception of when things happened, that is probably why.)

------------

That is a basic timeline of the problem.  It doesn't seem to me that
totalcounter is the real problem (or all of the problem), especially
since I hadn't used it since upgrading the pmwiki software and
because, even after removing the recipe, the site continued to
experience long delays in page loading times throughout the day, and
the delays just magically disappeared by the end of the day.

Could it be a problem with the beta version of pmwiki?  (That is what
my hosting company suggested I look into.)  I have no idea how to
investigate this problem further, but I would be willing to give
Patrick access to my site to see if he can figure it out.

Shaney.



On 1/5/07, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 07:49:42AM +0900, Shaney Crawford wrote:
> > On 1/4/07, dso <dso at moosoft.com> wrote:
> > > Shaney Crawford wrote:
> > > > My site is not responding for some reason.  It was fine yesterday
> > > > morning, but then in the afternoon, it was not responding.  I didn't
> > > > make any changes to it during that time.
> > >
> > > Probably some kind of loop caused by a recipe.  Try disabling them and
> > > then adding them back.  I've also had to change the order on a few of them.
> >
> > That seems to have worked.  Thank you!
> >
> > I'm not sure why it happened all of a sudden since I didn't add any
> > recipes yesterday.  Very strange.
>
> Which recipe(s) appeared to be causing the problem?  We should
> probably see about fixing the recipe to avoid the problem, or
> at least leave a note on the page in case others encounter the
> same difficulty.
>
> Pm
>
>
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