Intermittenet White Screens with WP 3.8.1

I’m running into this as well, running WordPress 3.8.1.

I originally opened a ticket last week, and thought it was because I was compressing the files. However, even with the compression setting off, I’m still having intermittent white screen problems on both the front-end and back-end of the sites.

I’m doing nothing fancy. My sites are all custom themes based on the Roots starter theme, and using common plugins. I’m running on Ubuntu 12.04 with the latest LAMP stack.

When it happens to me, I have to delete the caching PHP files it creates in WP-Content, and then reboot Apache.

For reference, here are the typical plugins I’m using:

ACF, CF7, CF7 Datepicker, Floating Social Bar, Google Analyticator, Google XML Sitemaps, Imsanity, MapPress Easy Google Maps, Post Types Order, Really Simple Captcha, Responsive Lightbox, Responsive Video Embeds, Search & Replace, Soliloquy Lite, UberMenu2, WordFence Security, WordPress Importer

Update: I now have four sites running this plugin without issue. They’re on WordPress 3.8.1 and on an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS LAMP VPS.

Yesterday I added WP Super Cache to two more sites all built the same way using almost identical plugins and on the same VPS – and they both white screened.

Very weird. I disabled WP Super Cache right away. The other sites? Running without issue.

Another update as of this afternoon: Two more sites that have been fine with the plugin have white screened. I’ve deactivated it on all of them for now. Bummer.

theatereleven, glad, well not glad, but am reassured to see that I am not the only one having problems. Spoke to a friend of mine today at Go Daddy, she is in the top tier support, and she thinks she knows what the problem is. Maybe just related to Go Daddy. She has been using WP since 2006, and is quite good. She will be running some tests today fro me.

Will get back if she solves the problem.

Something about Go Daddy starting to Black lists WPSC and W3TC

Nevis-1…thanks for the update! Interesting. Yeah, I hate not having this running on my sites. The odd thing is I’ve been brave (or dumb) and left it running on one of them, and so far, so good. It’s been on for over a week without a white screen.

The odd thing is that it’s on the same VPS as the others, and using many of the same plugins.

Look forward to the update.

theatereleven, noticed a plugin that you mentioned using (Floating Social Bar). I had just recently changed to that from Add To This Share any. Changed back from Floating Social Bar, and all problems fixed…for about 10 minutes.

My friend at Go Daddy looked at my error logs, and wp debug file.

It is definitely WP- Super Cache!

Will be trying to run W3 Total Cache today, hope it plays nicely with MAXCDN.

Let me know if you sort this mess out, really prefer WP Super Cache.

Fixed the problem, switched to W# Total Cache. No more white screens, and works with MAX/CDN….for now. Time will tell.

I have the same problem with white screen, after dezactivating this plugin everything works again.

Hope that it will be an update with a fix.

Thanks

Can you guys try to see if these steps will work in your sites.

Replace the content of your wp-content/cache/.htaccess file with the ff:

# BEGIN supercache
<IfModule mod_mime>
  <FilesMatch "\.html\.gz$">
    ForceType text/html FileETag None
  </FilesMatch>

  AddEncoding gzip .gz AddType text/html .gz
</IfModule> 

<IfModule mod_deflate>
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.gz$ no-gzip
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_headers>
  Header set Cache-Control 'max-age=3, must-revalidate'
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_expires>
ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType text/html A3
</IfModule>
# END supercache

Then delete cached pages.

See if the white screen will happen.

After I changed the file mentioned by spotoremor is still going to white screen.

Thanks Nevis-1 for the info and testing. I haven’t been brave enough to mess with the plugin anymore as these sites are business sites, and I’m gonna get yelled at eventually.

Here’s the weird part: I just did a new WP site for my brother’s business, have WP Super Cache installed, and it’s working fine for over a week. Not one white screen.

He’s on a different VPS, but I set both VPS installs up and they are both using Ubuntu 12.04LTS and LAMP.

His site is also using the same type of custom theme as the rest of my sites. He’s also using the same dang plugins, including the social bar. And, his site gets way more traffic than the others sites do too.

So for now I’m just upping the heck out of memory in my.cnf for all of the database caching that wouldn’t be happening with the plugin.

Let me know how Total W3 Cache goes…I had heard bad stuff about using that one.

A white screen usually means a PHP error of some sort so check your PHP error log.
There aren’t any PHP errors in the plugin but it does need to modify the wp-config.php and has to write to wp-content/advanced-cache.php and very occasionally PHP errors are introduced there.

If the white screen is intermittent it may be a memory error so try bumping how much memory PHP gets. (Use Google to find out how as it may depend on your particular hosting)

Donncha – thanks for responding dude.

I’ve upped my PHP memory limit to 320MB on a 1GB VPS. I have multiple WP sites on this VPS, so I’ll start slow and see what happens.

*For anyone wondering about this, if you’re on Debian/Ubuntu look in:

/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

The line is:

memory_limit – 320M (or whatever amount you want)

Now having the SAME problem with another site. Same hosting company, (Go Daddy) same theme, almost the same plugins, same shared server, and all was working fine until about 6 weeks ago. Same version WP, etc.

Sad to see such a great plugin no longer working. Personally I think it is WP 3.8.1…never had a problem until I updated….big mistake.

Now switching to W3TC until problem sorted. ??

Yep, just disabled WP Super Cache via ftp, white paged in the backend, and all is right with the world. ??