twnyny

I’ve been able to narrow this down to the WP-postratings plugin by activating and deactivating it. At first this didn’t seem to change anything, but my browser or web-sniffer.net was caching the pages. By using different URLs on my site I was able to turn the HTML on and off by activating and deactivating WP-postratings.

I’ve sent the author an email. This is significant problem if you depend on search engines indexing your site and you just send them blank pages.

Tom

Thanks for the quick response.

Since you go to the Dashboard automatically when you login, it’s hard to avoid it entirely. But based on your tip, I figured out another solution.

Patching WordPress files directly is stupid for lots of reasons, but in the wp-includes folder there’s a file called rss-functions.php.

Changing line 671 from:
update_option($cache_option, $rss);
to:
update_option($cache_option, “”);

is another way to prevent these huge entries from being re-stored in the database once you get rid of them.

There is a new space hog in WP 2.0 somewhere. If you look at your wp_options table, you’ll see some entries that begin with rss_ and that have a bunch of numbers after them. These are serialized arrays that contain other people’s blog content.

I just reduced the size of my options table from 265,572 bytes to 17,748 bytes by deleting these entries.

I have three blogs in one database – by cleaning up all three options tables, I reduced the size of my backup file from 274KB to 158KB.

What I don’t know is what part of WP is adding these monster rss_ entries to the options table or how to get it to stop doing that.

Can anyone help?

P.S. Don’t try this at home – I don’t recommend deleting the rss_ entries without a backup.

I have exactly the same problem. Could you clarify – was this file you deleted something in the server folder structure or was it an unused WordPress post or page stored in the database?

I’ve been having the exact same problem. The variable $doing_rss gets set to 1 by all the feed-related files, but nothing in WP ever seems to use it. It still should be available to plug-ins, but???

I couldn’t get is_feed() to work either. This does though:

`global $wp_query;

if ($wp_query->is_feed)’

The puzzle is why that works and is_feed(), which does the exact same thing, doesn’t. Surely you’re able to call WP functions from within plugins?