Missing jpegtran, optipng, gifsicle?

Looks like your webhost changed something that made it so exec couldn’t call a command that ‘forks’. That’s sort of what the ampersand at the end does, except the plugin actually just uses the functionality to redirect the error output to normal output. You’ll have to ask them how to resolve the issue (if they will even let you run the plugin).

It seems to be back to normal again today (although I didn’t change anything), and webhost didn’t see any issues so I’m not sure what happened there. I’ll just mark as resolved and hope it continues working. Thanks!

After I was thinking about it, sounded like the server was out of memory. I’ve seen errors like that before where a server will say ‘unable to fork’ because it doesn’t have any memory left for a new process. That would explain all the 500 errors as well, because the web server processes were probably having the same problem. They probably had already rebooted the server, and didn’t realize it was related to your issue.

Hi, problem is back again today. Media Temple (my hosting provider) has told me that they won’t block any type of rewrite in php or htaccess, unless your plugin is running commands with root access which they don’t allow on grid servers. They also said there’s no issues with the server being out of memory at all. Any suggestions?

the server is running out of something, otherwise you wouldn’t get that error. I would google for things that cause a linux server to throw that ‘unable to fork’ error. I’m sorry I don’t know what else to recommend, since your host will know much more about their servers than I do.

Okay, so I deleted the plugin and also the ewww folder with the jpgtran, gifsicle etc. But now all the errors are displaying on my front end. Here’s the site if you’d like to have a look:

https://www.filesnews.com

Any way to fully uninstall the plugin or erase the changes it’s made? I’ve cleared the cache from my caching plugin and purged my cloudflare cache as well. Just want to get my site back to pre-plugin state now.

Thanks!

It would seem deleting files and purging caches should be enough, since the errors are referring to files that no longer exist.

But just to be extra diligent I’m also wondering which database entries I can safely delete while keeping any pictures that I converted with EWWW intact?

Deactivating the plugin would be sufficient to get rid of the warnings. If you were still seeing them, that is definitely a caching issue. If you’ve flushed all your server side caches, then it is potentially a browser-side caching issue. If you want to completely clean things up, you can get rid of the ewwwio_images table, but if you think you ever might reinstall the plugin, I would leave it intact.

Lastly, I think it is worth mentioning that the cloud version of the plugin would likely work better on your server, since it doesn’t need to create extra processes, or use hardly any memory on your server. You can get more info at https://www.exactlywww.com/cloud/
The low-end plan is only $1/month (USD), so it’s quite affordable.

Thank you for your fast responses. I’m going to try another plugin for the time being, but if it doesn’t work out I will definitely consider trying the cloud version.

After disabling and re-enabling CloudFlare and purging the cache twice things seem to be back to normal on the homepage. So it does appear that after deleting the plugin it was just a caching issue, but still not sure what caused the errors to begin with.