Downtime - Resolved
Posted on October 7, 2007
3 Comments
A few days ago I mentioned I was having some downtime issues here. With a bit of luck and a lot of help, I believe I have it solved.
First off, I don't believe it was a plugin causing the issue. It seems to have (indirectly) been WordPress itself!
Long story short: A spider/bot was, for some reason, requesting a page that doesn't exist:
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65.55.209.75 - - [04/Oct/2007:17:56:14 -0700] "GET /blog/tag/UBUNTU%20How%20To:%20Make%20your%20fonts%20smooth%20enough%20to%20drool%20over./page/2/ HTTP/1.0" 200 955 "-" "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
Something about "How to make your fonts smooth enough to drool over", but treating each one of those words as a tag. The resulting query would run for hours and block all other database queries, thus grinding the entire site to a halt. That query goes off looking for all posts that have all those words as tags. A Tag "intersection" query.
Thing is, none of those words are tags so I'm not sure how the bot decided to request that page.
In the WP-Testers thread that I had started, there was some discussion about how tag "intersection" queries ought to work. As a result, there was an updated query.php file created. Grabbing that and installing it appears to have caused my problems to stop.
A big thanks to "Justin" from Dreamhost for his patience through this. He could've punted me after the first incident, but he hung in there and let me test and even taught me a few ways to keep track of what was going on in the database.
Also, big thanks to everyone who participated and made suggestions in the WP-Testers thread. Thanks Lloyd for giving me that gentle smack upside the head to actually go look in the logs!
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Tags: database, DreamHost, support, testing, WordPress
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3 Responses to “Downtime - Resolved”
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nslookup for that IP shows it is a M$ “Live” server, which are absolutely the most broken droids I’ve ever seen. I run into problems like that all the time with the sites I host. They’ll take the name of an image, change it from .jpg to .html, and search for it, so logo.jpg becomes logo.html. Idjits!
I have few sites on DreamHost. All the time a have problems if one of my sites got in social networks and have some traffic.
They told me also that is from WP..Now am on Drupal..but same thing happens.
Henry - good stuff, thanks for sharing. Idjits sums it up well.
Streaming - there are definitely limits with shared hosting (regardless of host)!