Have you tried:
– deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).
– switching to the Twenty Ten theme to rule out any theme-specific problems.
– resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems.
Thanks for the suggestions esmi!
I went through the deactivating-reactivating plugins the first time I crashed the server. That led me to delete a few plugins that seemed questionable, although I couldn’t confirm completely that they had caused the problem. I haven’t added anything new since, figured I had the problem licked, even though it new page opening and page saving were still really slow. Are these aspects slow by nature or is this evidence of an actual problem?
I’ll try your other suggestions, especially the “resetting the plugins folder” one. That peaks my interest.
I’ll admit though that I hate to do to much poking around at this point since my hosting company is ready to send me packin. Isnt there some kind of WP diagnostic tool to help with instances like this? If not, not there should be!
Oh well, here goes nothing.. thanks again for your suggestions.
Are these aspects slow by nature or is this evidence of an actual problem?
They could be, yes.
my hosting company is ready to send me packin
On what basis?
Isnt there some kind of WP diagnostic tool to help with instances like this?
There are tools that can help diagnose database queries. And there’s at least 1 plugin that can check if a theme has been coded to the standards required by the Theme Repository. But I don’t know of anything that can identify a bad plugin.
my hosting company is ready to send me packin
This is the third time that my site has crashed the server. They cant allow my site to keep taking the shared server down.. I can understand that.
So here’s whats happening now. I did your reset the plugins folder suggestion yesterday eve.
This morning I set the theme to twenty ten and deactivated all the plugins – figuring I’d test a little with a core setup. I clicked on the page/add new option and it took 3 min 06 seconds to open. That can’t be right?? So then I put in three paragraphs of text with some bullet points and a couple of hyperlinks (no images). Clicked Save Draft and after 31 minutes of trying to save I got this message:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, [email protected] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
It’s like it went into some kind of never ending loop. Any ideas on what’s going on here?
I clicked on the page/add new option and it took 3 min 06 seconds to open. That can’t be right??
That’s most definitely not right. Did you just deactivate the plugins or did you reset the plugins folder? If you haven’t tried it, I suggest trying the latter. If that doesn’t help, try resetting your permalinks to the default (ugly) setting and renaming the .htaccess file in your WordPress folder to see if that helps.
You might also want to re-upload all files & folders – except the wp-content folder – from a fresh download of WordPress in case you have a bad file somewhere. Finally, you might have look at your database. How many posts do you have in the database?
Did you just deactivate the plugins or did you reset the plugins folder?
Yesterday I followed the reset plugins folder instructions, set the template to 20-10 and tried to add a new page. It took a little less than three minutes to open the new page, but not much (2 min 40 secs =/-). I entered the same text that I tried this morning and it did save it, although it seemed to take about 5 1/2 minutes approximately to do so. It was slow but at least it didn’t crash the server. From there I started to reactivate some of the plugins. After each I would add a few sentences to the page and then saved the draft. The save timeframe didn’t seem to be getting any worse, then I had to quit for the day.
This morning I thought I’d do some more testing, but I’d try to be more accurate and time how long it was actually taking to open a new page and to save a draft. In order to get accurate readings, I figured I’d start from the beginning. So I “deactivated” all my plugins and with the 20-10 template still in place I decided to open a new page – that’s when it took over 3 minutes to open a new page and when I went to save the draft (using the same amount of text as before) it crashed the server.
I will definitely try your resetting the permalinks suggestion as well as the re-uploading folders one.
As far as..
Finally, you might have look at your database. How many posts do you have in the database?
I did jump in through phpmyadmin and ran a database check, everything came back OK, but I ran a repair anyway just to be safe. Our database isn’t really that big. We current have 569 posts and 365 pages.
Thanks again for all your suggestions, I’m gonna try your latest ones right now and see what happens.
Re-uploading all the files and folders (except wp_content) from a fresh download of WP helped a little (new page opens in about 1 min 45 sec) but when I set permalinks back to default.. bingo! New page opens in about 3 seconds (even before I’ve renamed htaccess file)! Guess I’ll head off to figure out the permalink problem.
Thanks for all your help esmi!
