White screen mid-investigation

  • Hi,

    I was hoping to use Plugin Detective to figure out what plugin is causing all the other plugins on my website to turn off. I guess I’m trying to use this to work “backwards”? But after 4 investigations, I guess you’d call it, I get a white screen. I’m not really sure what’s happening. Has it identified the problem plugin? But I’m not sure how to see what combination of plugins on/off caused the white screen.

    Some more background in case it helps… recently our nonprofit’s website has been crashing quite a bit. All of the plugins are turning off and then that causes everything to look all crazy and then I get an email saying the website is down. But I’m not sure what is causing all the plugins to turn off. This has been happening whenever automatic updates are scheduled.

    I originally tried disabling auto-updates, but left Smart Plugin Manager active (just not updating anything). But it still crashed the site at the next scheduled update. I’ve now completely disabled SPM until I can figure out which plugin it’s not playing nice with. Manual updates are okay though!

    Any help is appreciated!

    Thanks!

    J

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author croixhaug

    (@croixhaug)

    Hi @imjeanneus it sounds like you might have an intermittent problem (or one only triggered during updates or something) which can be the hardest thing to troubleshoot. If it’s a whitescreen, generally you should be clicking the “it’s broken” step in Plugin Detective. All that said, Plugin Detective is a helpful tool but with intermittent problems or those that only appear in very specific combinations, it may not be able to figure it out. Hope that helps, SPM is on WPEngine so I’m assuming you’re hosted there. You could clone to a staging site and run Plugin Detective (and other experiments) there?

    PS. it’s a very fast response, but I’m not a bot, you just happened to catch me right as I was on wp.org ??

    Thread Starter imjeanneus

    (@imjeanneus)

    thank you!! and yep! i’m on wpengine.

    that’s my thought too… i’m trying it out on staging and asking plugin detective to keep trying if i’m not able to replicate the issue. or maybe i’ll wait until the problem naturally happens again… since chances are it will Q____Q

    Plugin Author croixhaug

    (@croixhaug)

    @imjeanneus yes, technically you can let Plugin Detective be in the middle of a step for many hours. And then when it happens, you can click “it’s broken”, so you could afford to be patient waiting for the problem to materialize on staging

    Plugin Detective also randomly selects the groups of plugins to try, so sometimes you get lucky when trying it 2 or 3 times.

    Best of luck!

    Thread Starter imjeanneus

    (@imjeanneus)

    oh!! i didn’t know you could do that! i’ll let plugin detective sit around for awhile then. fingers crossed!

    thanks so much!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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