Andrei Neculau

I’ve been having lots of 500 Internal Server Error messages on my blog lately.

Well, sometimes because of the way Wordpress eats up memory, sometimes because of something else.. the cache!

When you see that your blog is running a bit slow (it happens in shared hosting, and especially with memory eaters) you immediately think about cacheing. If you don’t think on your own, then you might complain to Dreamhost’s Support Service, file a ticket, and they will do the thinking for you.

Now, what they don’t know.. is that, while cacheing is a good concept, apparently the Wordpress cacheing plugins are troublesome. After checking all of my plugins (of course, not checking exactly the right one) reading about it and then some more, I tried disabling my WP Super Cache plugin (it’s an enhanced version of WP Cache, but the later is still problematic. Bingo! No more 500 Internal Server Errors.

PS: Yes, I’ve been thinking of ditching Dreamhost for MediaTemple. But no! Stick with something good enough, willing to help out (Dreamhost’s Support Service always seemed to have a collaboration attitude) and try to improve the situation. Moving around can only mean trial and error.

UPDATE

I have isolated the issue even more. It is not related to WP Super Cache per say, but to its compression feature. GZIP does take a lot of CPU time, and as a user puts it:

Also, I understand that disabling GZIP compression, even though it reduces bandwidth, will increase the CPU time. Disable it. After all, on Dreamhost, bandwidth isn’t the issue - CPU time is.

The problem is that for me, WP Super Cache didn’t disable the GZIPing properly. After disabling the feature, and after disabling the plugin, under wp-content/cache I still had a .htaccess file that was telling the server to feed any requests from there with GZIP. After deleting the .htaccess and activating WP Cache, I’m quite confident to say I’m back on track.

I’m using ZenPhoto as a Media Gallery web interface, but it wasn’t able to do automatic rotation by reading the EXIF information. I expected that to be public with version 1.2, but no.

After a bit of searching and thinking and improving, I’ve ended up updating some core files, and it’s now supposed to work flawlessly in this regard. The only thing is that the EXIF information gets read each time from the file, instead of reading it from the database (need to work on that). The changes also support image fliping.

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Wordpress 2.6 introduces revisions to each post.

That actually caused my series plugin to break down, but that was fixed by me with two edits.

But the main part is that.. weirdly.. the Wordpress team didn’t put an option to disable these, as they can create useless data records. I, for one, like the feature, but I don’t see myself using that.

It’s neat for publishers and multi-user blogging, when people review and edit and add photos, etc.. one person at a time. But when there’s just one person doing it.. it’s close to useless. I couldn’t care less how this post looked like one day or one month ago..

So the only way to turn the feature off is to edit your wp-config.php file and put

define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);

But what about those revisions left in your database? Several posts look as if they found the true answer, but it’s one of those “The one who laughs last, laughs best” situations. Didn’t those people hear about post meta? Or about post terms (tags, categories, or series?! )?¹

Here’s the proper way to clean your MySQL DB for Wordpress from post revisions.

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1. No offense intended, just disappointment.. [↩]

I’m publishing online my Bachelor Degree paper (thesis; ro. Lucrare de Licență).

Why? Several reasons. One of them is because I think it’s normal to publish your works. The others are all on a need-to-know basis

I’d say it’s not great, ’cause it’s not what I wanted in the first place (things needed prioritization), but even so it’s still a good paper and project.

I liked the analysis part, in terms of management and effort/outcome ratio, along with adjusting the project to the needs.

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