Tag Archive for ‘downtime’

No more wp-cache 16

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I’ve had it with wp-cache. Everytime I enable it on this blog bad things happen. When I released Redoable 1.1, it got posted on weblogtoolscollection.com, and on Smashing Magazine and I got mountains of traffic very quickly. I didn’t have wp-cache installed at the time, an despite receiving about 10 times more traffic than a normal day my blog was relatively ok. Despite this I followed a couple of peoples advice and installed wp-cache….you know….just in case.

Over the next week or so my site crashed a couple of times, according to Dreamhost some was my fault ( ? ) and some was due to downtime of their servers. Then things got really bad. The first week of March my site was gone. Nothing I did would bring it back. I disabled every plugin, and then I deleted them, and then I went back to the default theme….nothing, Dreamhost couldn’t help, and I was lost for ideas. After being down for almost a week I had a brain snap, “what if I delete the cache files produced by wp-cache”, and guess what….my site came back. It would appear that something was corrupted and was killing my site. Goodbye wp-cache (attempt 1).

So I de-activated wp-cache, afterall that “should” be all you need to do to stop a plugin, right? Wrong. It was still caching files (and periodically killing my blog, wtf?). Apparently you have to disable it AND then deactivate it. Stupid…oh how stupid.

Skip forward about 6 or so weeks and it was time for me to released Redoable 1.2. I did that on the night of the 25th, and about an hour after I posted the update, I thought I’d give wp-cache another go (afterall, surely my experience last time was random, and wouldn’t be repeated). I went to the wp-cache site and downloaded the lastest version, then I installed it….everythine was ok, or so it seemed.

So last night almost exactly 24 hours after I installed, activated and configured wp-cache, guess what happened. Yes, my blog shat itself again. Thing was I was asleep and didn’t find out about it until this morning, so my site was down for 8 hours, really quite pissed off about that.

Instead of the usual disable plugins one by one routine, I went straight to the cache folder thats used by wp-cache and blew the files away….guess what. My site instantly came back. Damn you wp-cache thats the last chance. I will never be using it again, I don’t care what people say about it, but quite obviously something about my site just doesn’t like it.

Wp-cache is gone, disabled, deactivated, deleted. Good riddance.

Note: Yes I deliberately linked to just about every site that was related EXCEPT the wp-cache site. It just doesn’t deserve the link. Yes I am bitter.

its always the last thing you try 10

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Having a website crash is annoying, having it be down for a week is very, very annoying.

I have spent the last week trying to work out what had killed my blog (for the second time in a month). Initially I thought it was connected to the file server issues that Dreamhost was having, and their first support response suggested the same. But when they eventually got their issue solved my blog didn’t come back to life.

Its was strange because all my other Dreamhost hosted sites were working, and even my support forum was working and its under the same domain as this blog. The next suggestion was that it could have been the WP 2.1.1 exploit…but I hadn’t install 2.1.1. Anyway I upgraded to 2.1.2 in the hope that it would fix the problem…no.

Next step, and the one that I wanted to avoid, was to backup everything and do a fresh install of Wordpress. While in the process of backing everything up, I noticed that the wp-content/cache folder was rather large (about 59 mb)…which didn’t seem right considering my whole site is only about 10MB.

So….I delete the 800-odd cache files, and guess what. Now my blog works again. Shit hey? I have left wp-cache disabled for the time being, at least until I’m sure that I have the absolutely latest version. It would appear that the Dreamhost file server issue was not the problem afterall. Although the timing has to be more than just coincidence, perhaps the file server problem corrupted something in the wp-cache folder, thus brining the blog down.

Either way I’m back (again), lets hope this ends the bad run of problems experienced in the past month.

Support forums back online 0

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After the drama of the last couple of days, my support forums got a bit messed up in the transfer that I had to do from one user to another. When I got home from work tonight, I got ready for the challenge (I was expecting the worst) of getting them back up and running, without losing any data.

But…they seem to have fixed themselves. Awesome. So with that go forth and post all your support question, queries, problems, suggestion etc.

Support Forums are back online!

To those have applied for membership to the support forums in the past few hours, you now have access. I have also set it back to auto-approve new members.

Socialized through Gregarious 42