Constantly times out & 500 Error

Sorry this took so long, I ran a hack-scan (clean! No worries) and that takes a little while ??

One really fast thing is that you’re still on PHP 5.2 – It’s not really the best with memory usage, so I’d upgrade to 5.3 since you’re on shared. Just go to https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=domain.manage& and click on ‘edit’ for your domain. Then change PHP to 5.3 FastCGI. If you’re STILL getting 500s, then try Just plain 5.3 CGI but…

Looking at your error log, I see a LOT of “Premature end of script headers” errors, and when I ran WP-CLI commands, I got a lot of extra white-space in the output, which makes me think you have a theme or plugin that’s generating some garbage. You may want to turn on debugging to see if there’s an obvious error (edit wp-config.php and change define('WP_DEBUG', false); to define('WP_DEBUG', true); )

Another minor suggestion: WP Super Cache is running but you don’t have the entries in .htaccess, which means you probably have it set up to use PHP. Using .htaccess is faster and uses less memory.

What;s the exact error on the image? I checked your /tmp folder and that’s pretty clean.

Oh, and about caching, you don’t have a cache location defined in wp-config.php so it may not be working fully.

Thanks for all that. Not sure I can figure it out with a ton of fear of nuking things. I deleted the SuperCache because there was another one being used. I hope it’s ok.

The image upload error is completely unhelpful. All it says is “HTTP Error” in a pink colored box and gives an action to Dismiss Errors. If I open the Media Library in a separate window, then upload an image, I can go back to the post and Add Media and it adds but only if I hit Save between each image. Saving is good but it’s annoying. It will crap out like that even when trying to make a new gallery.

That’s actually helpful!

So what’s happening is that these images, either because of size or complexity, are filling up your /tmp folder and causing it not to be able to process the image. I ran a command to clean out temp (it’s temp data anyway, it’s generally safe to clean).

It’s down to a much smaller size now.

How big are these images?

I deleted the SuperCache because there was another one being used. I hope it’s ok.

Eh. I prefer WP Super-Cache since it’s really friendly and nice to Shared, but you do have it active, wp-super-cache, so if you’re NOT using it, uninstall the plugin totally so it’s not being called ??

Images are usually around 3MB or less. Thanks for the /tmp help.

I actually got an email back from DreamHost saying there were traffic issues which explains why my hits went down from around 600 one day to almost none the next day. Something was keeping people from getting to my blog.

Someone had a 61meg file that failed on upload on your server. We’ve had words about what’s not a good idea on shared!

In theory, now that tmp is cleaned out, you should be … better on image upload? I hate the http error :/ It’s so flipping vague!

Thank you so much!

For some reason my comment was godmodded out of here, I was just looking for a way to contact the dreamhost rep and I had no other way than to leave a tiny message in this their latest forum post which apparently was too obstructive in its two sentences glory to leave here for a day. So now just asking the mod then what should I do? Start a topic? What do you suggest?

If you’re trying to contact DreamHost, you can use their support system.

Or, yes, please start your own thread if you have a WordPress support question.

And if you don’t have an account – https://www.dreamhost.com/contact/ ??

But you shouldn’t hijack other people’s topics, it’s against the guidelines for this fourm.

Well, I think it’s good that dreamhost & this forum were able to work together because going through only one never works. DH blames WP; WP blames DH. This worked and I’m happy.

DH blames WP; WP blames DH

Yeah, I’m personally REALLY sorry about that, and I’m working at DreamHost to stop that pattern of behavior. Sometimes, yes, it IS WP, and sometimes it’s DH, but sometimes it’s this horrible synergistic combination of baaaaaaarrejkldlxkjfsdfsd. That’s a technical word ??

Part of my job at DreamHost is to find these issues, fix them for the customer right here and now, and then take it on back to the folks at DH so it doesn’t happen again.