Bizarre: WordPress works, then breaks

  • Hey all. I’m experiencing this bizarre problem with my WordPress and I’m out of ideas on how to fix it. Here’s the setup: I was running WP 2.5.1 on a shared linux host, and am in the process of moving to a linux VPS.

    I copied my WordPress installation over to the new server, transferred the database, did all the stuff it says to do, and after a little bit of mucking with .htaccess files and file permissions/owners, my blog came up fine. I was thinking, “great, it works fine!”.

    A few hours later, my blog began returning blank pages for everything. Not even the admin pages would come up.

    My blog lives in a subdirectory appropriately named “blog”. In an experiment, I cloned my broken blog directory (cp -r –preserve=all blog blog2). It turns out this clone (blog2) works as expected (when named blog). The original broken blog directory returns blank pages. I can switch back and forth between them and see this behavior.

    Doing a diff on the two directories (diff -r blog blog2) returns no differences.

    Any idea what might be going on here, or additional experiments I could do to determine why blog2 works but blog returns blank pages?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • same theme being used?

    blank pages of any kind indicate php errors. checked your error_logs lately? turned on error reporting, and echoing back the errors?

    Thread Starter Tarindel

    (@tarindel)

    Yup, same theme. No configuration changes at all between the one that works and one that doesn’t.

    Hmm, I checked /var/log/httpd/error_log and there are some errors in there (segmentation faults — could be unrelated to wordpress) and something about an error with the wp-stats plugin (which coincidentally I note no longer displays anything on my dashboard — that used to work). Not sure whether they’re relevant, as the working blog2 directory seems to work fine anyway.

    Thread Starter Tarindel

    (@tarindel)

    Incidentally, the problem with wp-stats is the same as is posted here:

    https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/167625?replies=12

    which I just fixed. My old server had php4, the new one is php5.

    Thread Starter Tarindel

    (@tarindel)

    I think I have a resolution to this one. Doubt most of you care, but I’ll post it here in case anybody in the future runs across this while doing a google search for a similar problem.

    Since copying new files over the old ones somehow temporarily fixed my site, I decided to take one of the “broken” directory structures and do some trial and error to see if I could track exactly which file was causing the problems. I figured it would probably be something in wp-content, like a caching plugin. I was wrong (but not too far wrong). It turns out the problem file is kses.php. When I copy over kses.php with a new (identical) version of kses.php, my site begins working again for a period of time.

    All of those seg faults in the apache error log are correlated with my site breaking. So something is happening that causes kses.php to suddenly start seg faulting after a while. After a little research on the google, it looks like there are reported issues of this file not playing nicely with eaccelerator:

    https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/137937?replies=5

    I’m pretty sure that this issue is a manifestation of that problem. It’s the only thing so far that makes all the symptoms make sense.

    interesting. I was hosted on aso for nearly 2 years — never had a problem. Have my own colocated box now elsewhere.. apache/php/mysql and eaccellerator, and dont see an issue now either.

    good to take note of though, just in case.

    Thread Starter Tarindel

    (@tarindel)

    Just as a followup, I told eaccelerator not to cache kses.php and my site has been up all morning… so looks like that was definitely it.

    I wonder why some people experience this and others don’t. Peculiar…

    Danao

    (@danao)

    Was I locked out of Learncpp or are you having problems with the server? [email protected]

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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