Please help me discover why my site goes down every week

  • Hello all, I’m finally opening a topic here as I’m getting desperate with the problems I am experiencing. Basically what is happening is that almost weekly, my main site dbzer0.com will suddenly go down with “internal server errors”. I am currently hosted with Dreamhost on a VPS which means my RAM is limited to 150MB (but I can increase it at will).

    Normally, those 150Mb are more than enough for 4 WordPress sies and 2 Gallery2 installations but at these (random?) points, my RAM usage will spike and all of them (which are on the same VPS) will go down.

    This is definitely related to only dbzer0.com as when this happens I can’t access this site, no matter how much I increase my resources and I can avoid the usage spike by simply taking down only this site (renaming the root directory to something else for example) everything else keeps working splendidly. But as soon as I rename the dir back to its original name everything stops once more)

    I have tried many things to resolve it, even going as far as replacing my WP installation with a “factory default” one (so-to-speak) with no plugins and just the default theme. As soon as I restored the dir site usage once again spiked.

    I suspected a DDOS but I am quite a small fish so I can’t imagine why this would happen. I also checked my access.log and didn’t find much evidence to support this. I suspected web crawlers and I’ve even ammended my bots.txt file to slow them down but this keeps going on.

    I am really at the end of my wits. Is there anything you can suggest I should look for? Any way to troubleshoot this? Currently the site is down (I’ve renamed the dir again) and I lack ssh access as I’m currently behind a corporate firewall and lack internet access at home for the moment. So I can use only FTP for now.

    I’ve also contacted Dreamhost about this but in the past they haven’t been of much help with issues such as these and can take up to 2 days to respond so I’m not expecting help soon from there.

    So please, help?

Viewing 15 replies - 16 through 30 (of 37 total)

  • How can you tell if your wp_options is corrupted?

    wordpress will behave like its not installed, and you will be prompted to install (again).

    you can check for crashed tables inside phpmyadmin.

    yeah i used phpmyadmin from my cpanel. there’s an option to repair db.

    i turned off supercache for a while. havent crashed yet for 3 days.

    what wordpress version are you using db0? I’m on 2.7.

    Thread Starter db0

    (@db0)

    @whooami: In my case WordPress didn’t behave like this. It simply started spawning runaway php processes. In phpmyadmin I just went to the table and selected “Repair” but I didn’t see any notice of it being corrupted.

    @dryords: I’m using 2.7.1 without Supercache which is known to cause problems for Dreamhost.

    hmm, just checking back. my blog seems to be stable for now with supercache turned off. how about yours? have you tried turning off hypercache?

    if this continues for another week i’ll try using db-cache instead of supercache.

    Thread Starter db0

    (@db0)

    Mine seems to be stable as well but I’m still using Hypercache and no DB-Cache.

    Of course I’m mostly offline lately so even if it did go down, I would probably miss it

    Michael Torbert

    (@hallsofmontezuma)

    WordPress Virtuoso

    @db0
    Platinum SEO is certainly not an upgrade over All in One SEO Pack, and AIOSEOP has absolutely not been discontinued.

    Thread Starter db0

    (@db0)

    Unfortunately even though my site seemed to be running stably for 2 months now and I thought I’d found the culprit, once again I get the same issue now.

    Resource use takes off and Internal Server Errors happen. I repair the wp_options table and then it works fine.

    Can anyone tell me where to look to figure why this is happening? How can my wp_options table be corrupted just like that? Is there a way to start debugging this?

    Sorry to disappoint with all the work you did, but best I can tell, internal server errors and random website problems are a common experience with Dream Host. I had the EXACT same issues as you, and found that many others do as well. That is – until I came across HyperCache. After I installed this plugin, notices of my website being down went to essentially zero (use to get notices throughout the week). I still get random internal server errors and the WP admin is always slow, but my website is very fast. I use WP 2.8.4. Check out my website: https://www.bmedreport.com

    I then added WP Widget Cache to HyperCache with no problems for added speed. I am not sure if I can leave good enough alone as I now contemplate uninstalling the WP Widget Cache and replacing it with the DB Cache Reloaded. I read (actually at DreamHost support) that the HyperCache/DB Cache creates a fantastically fast website.

    Thread Starter db0

    (@db0)

    cfisher, I’ve been using Hypercache for a long time now and it’s not a caching issue. I’m the one who’s written the unofficial DH WordPress performance guide and the one who suggested DB cache along with Hypercache. However afaik DB Cache’s latest versions might be buggy so I suggest you stay away from it for now..

    Hi dB0,

    I think you might have misread my post just a bit. I said that HyperCache solved many of my problems – not that it caused them. Also, notice too that I said DB Cache Reloaded (notice: Reloaded)… it is a fork of the original DB cache that is suppose to be compatible with WP 2.8.4. Check it out..

    Also, I went ahead and installed the DB Cache Reloaded alongside HyperCache today and have not had a single problem, and my website seems really fast.

    Thread Starter db0

    (@db0)

    I said that it’s not a “caching issue” not that Hypercache is “causing the issue” ??

    I know it’s not, It’s just that the same thing has happened many times while under Hypercache.

    I didn’t know about DB Cache Reloaded. I might check it out, thanks ??

    Just wondering if you’ve checked your database with php MyAdmin wp-users for any bogus admin additions…?

    My site would crash after trying to publish a post – it had been infected. Repairing database tables didn’t work for me either. It’s fixed now, just thought I might mention it in case the same thing happened to you.

    All the best.

    Thread Starter db0

    (@db0)

    I have in fact checked it. I couldn’t find anything suspicious but I am considering recreating the DB just to get that possibility out of the way. It’s only the myriad of options I’ll have to reset that are holding me back….

    Just in case (though you may have tried this too) – I found the best and quickest way to clean my site was to COMPLETELY delete wp-admin and wp-includes and do a fresh manual install.

    Doing the same with the plugins in question also helped.

    All the best.

Viewing 15 replies - 16 through 30 (of 37 total)
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