Website freezes after digital product file upload

Hello taod86,

Thank you for contacting WooCommerce support with the issue you’re facing when uploading downloadable files through a product page.

It’s certainly unusual for the website to become unresponsive for 5 to 30 minutes following such an upload, and I appreciate the impact this can have on your business operations.

To assist you further, it would be very helpful if you could provide the following pieces of information:

1. System Status: Please navigate to WooCommerce > Status in your admin dashboard. Once there, select “Get system report”, and then click on “Copy for support”. Once you’ve done that, you can paste the text in https://gist.github.com. After that, you can paste the Gist link here in your reply.

2. Error Log: It would also be beneficial to examine a copy of the fatal error log from around the time the unresponsiveness occurred. You can access this under WooCommerce > System Status > Logs.

Having these details will greatly aid us in diagnosing and understanding what might be causing these disruptions to your site after file uploads. Your cooperation is much appreciated, and I’m here to help you resolve this pressing issue as swiftly as possible.

Looking forward to your response. ??

There you go:

System Status: https://gist.github.com/amatelin/8e6d68c42c63fa9ea4d42590eac878c8

Only error log matching the date: https://gist.github.com/amatelin/fcbe30c071ba990c74eabce03d3efc2d

Hello taod86!

Thank you for your reply.

After carefully reviewing the System Status Report you provided, everything appears to be in order, and the error logs are also showing up clean.

Since these aspects of your WooCommerce installation seem to be functioning correctly, the issue may be related to your server’s resources or configuration.

Have you reached out to your hosting company regarding this matter? The server may be encountering a bottleneck when you’re attempting to upload multiple files simultaneously. Your hosting provider will have the necessary tools to monitor server performance and identify any spikes in resource usage, which could shed light on the issue. I suggest contacting them for insights and to see what they recommend.

Additionally, if it’s feasible for you, could you share the same batch of files with me? I would like to attempt uploading them to my test site to see if I can replicate the problem. This would help me gain a better understanding of whether the issue might be with the files themselves or something else entirely.

Please let me know how your conversation with the hosting provider goes and whether you can provide the files for further testing. ??

Best regards.

I do believe it’s a server side issue. From what I can investigate the sequence of event is as follows:

• Upload initiated =>
• Upload completes – servers overloads for a couple of minutes when the thumbnails are generated (nothing surprising here, it just increases the response time of the server a bit but the same happens if I upload a lot of images to the gallery) =>
• Website becomes unavailable BUT only on my home network it turns out! If I use a proxy or my phone’s network I can access it (even when it is slowed down due to processing background tasks related to uploads).

The timing of the interruption makes it eerily similar to having to wait for a DNS propagation. So it led me to believe that maybe when resource usage peaks right after the upload for a few seconds the websites times out, litespeed picks up this state of things and serves this broken cached version until it is updated with a new cache. So I deactivated the caching and…still encountered the same issue. Also bypassed the CDN I’m using but still the issue persists. Also used a variety of DNS providers, both reconfiguring my local machine and my router to go through them instead of the ISP. No change. A real head scratcher.

As for my hosting provider they have been…very difficult to work with on that matter (I pretty much sent them what I’m sharing with you here and they answered with something like: “To take a screenshot of your screen and share it with our technical team, follow this tutorial!” and “everything seems to be working fine on our end, closing this ticket!”). So I am in the process of migrating which I hope will solve this peculiar issue.

As for sharing the batch of files, no problem. Do you have an email address I can write you at with a link to my drive? Those are files that I sell so I don’t want to link publicly to it.

Anyway, thank you very much for your help regarding this. I know it’s a fringe situation so I really appreciate all the help I can get to get my store up and running. I should be done with the migration today, I’ll let you know if the problem went away on its own after that.

Hi @taod86,

It’s unfortunate that your current hosting provider hasn’t been as helpful as you’d like. I agree with your decision to migrate to a different host, as this could potentially solve the problem.

While you’re in the process of migrating, I recommend considering Woo Express as your new hosting provider. We offer a variety of plans that come with excellent customer support and are optimized for WordPress and WooCommerce.

For example, includes access to live chat support 24/7, Fast and secure hosting, 200 GB storage space, automated site backups, and more. This could be beneficial for your store’s operations and future growth.

I look forward to hearing how the migration goes and if it resolves the issue. If not, we’ll continue to work together to find a solution.