phasetransitions

Solved this, finally! And like many annoying problems, it wasn’t WordPress

For the peanut gallery and Google posterity:
NGINX uses files in /var/lib/nginx/fastcgi/ to manage various things. As such, NGINX must have write access to this directory. In the midst of our NGINX configurations ./fastcgi ownership was changed to NGINX (user ‘nobody’), but all of the subdirectories remained owned by www-data:www-data.

Recursive chown on those subdirectories to nginx’s user fixed the problem, as it can now write those files.

This doesn’t recover my lost day, but hopefully it will be useful to someone else ??

Andrew,

Indeed no plugins, and 2011 theme. Since I am working to migrate all of my wordpress properties to multi-site, originally I had much more going on.

In the interest of solving this problem, I kept dropping the database, simplifying the install, and reinstalling WP. Eventually ending up with a completely vanilla install. All this on new VPS metal that I know well, and has been carefully configured.

In Chrome 23 and Firefox 17, when load-script calls jquery.js, it just stops parsing mid script. The output from FireBug/Chrome console (F12) just ends like so:
f.support.opacity||(f.cssHooks.opacity={get:function(a,b){return bq.test((b&&a.curr

Clearly that’s not correct, but both stop at exactly the same character in jquery.js makes me think something on the backend is wonky.

I tried the site both with APC disabled, and APC enabled, with no difference. Parsing jquery.js still stops at the same character both times.

Derick,

Have you tried to see if this happens when nginx passses to something other than Apache (e.g php-fpm)?