Frequent commenters have noticed that the blog is throwing a lot of server errors lately. I have not been able to identify the precise cause. Communicating with Dreamhost, it appears that something launches a process that loads a large amount of memory. This causes Dreamhost to start killing processes to keep my from taking down shared hosting, which is fair.
Unfortunately for me, the error logs show which processes were interrupted, but these are not necessarily the process that sucked up too much memory. In any case, the process that is interrupted tends to be the version of php being run. This is pretty unenlightening, since the problem almost certainly lies with a particular plugin not php overall.
Since I have no particular skills in identifying the problem, I’ve been turning off plugins. Some of you will notice that editing functionality for comments has been turned off. Some other plugins are also turned off, but most of you will not notice. (The plugin that insert ads is off. A plugins that makes the archives look pretty is off. The plugin that caches things to reduce CPU was turned off last night, and turned back on. I thought it might suck memory while sparing CPU. Well, turning it off definitely makes the blog use too much CPU– around 6 am server errors were nearly constant.)
Dreamhost staff suggested merely having unused plugins in the plugin folder can soak up memory, so I moved nearly all unused plugins out of the folder. (I had a shockingly large number of plugins in there.) If you experience no server errors today, we’ll have found the problem. 🙂
In the meantime, if any of you happen to have any expertise in optimizing WP installations, let me know. Thanks in advance.
Have you thought of closing the blog to open login, set trace or use a debugger, and trying to cause the problem while it can be identified?
Sorry, no experience with what this would actually be in WP.
test
I’ll try posting a very long comment: DONT BOTHER READING THIS!
The Tour de France is an annual bicycle race held in in France and nearby countries. First staged in 1903, the race covers more than 3,600 kilometres (2,200 mi) and lasts three weeks. As the best known and most prestigious of cycling’s three “Grand Tours”;, the Tour de France attracts riders and teams from around the world. The race is broken into day-long segments, called stages. Individual times to finish each stage are aggregated to determine the overall winner at the end of the race. The rider with the lowest aggregate time at the end of each day wears a yellow jersey.[1] The course changes every year, but the race has always finished in Paris. Since 1975, the climax of the final stage has been along the Champs-Élysées.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Description
* 2 Origins
* 3 Birth
* 4 First Tour de France
o 4.1 ‘Last’ Tour
* 5 Early rules
o 5.1 Touriste-routiers and regionals
o 5.2 National teams
o 5.3 Return of trade teams
* 6 Distances
* 7 Advertising caravan
* 8 Strikes, exclusions and disqualifications
* 9 Organisers
* 10 Politics
o 10.1 Corsica
* 11 Current status
o 11.1 Prizes
o 11.2 Classification jerseys
+ 11.2.1 Overall leader
+ 11.2.2 Stage points
+ 11.2.3 King of the Mountains
+ 11.2.4 Miscellaneous categories
+ 11.2.5 Historical jerseys
+ 11.2.6 Lanterne rouge
o 11.3 Stages
+ 11.3.1 Mass-start stages
+ 11.3.2 Individual time trials
+ 11.3.3 Team time trial
o 11.4 Notable stages
* 12 Broadcasting
* 13 Culture
o 13.1 Arts
* 14 Doping
* 15 Deaths
* 16 Statistics
o 16.1 Stage wins
o 16.2 Stage wins by nationality
o 16.3 Stage towns
o 16.4 Stage speeds
o 16.5 Successful breakaways
* 17 See also
* 18 Notes
* 19 References
* 20 Further reading
* 21 External links
[edit] Description
The Tour de France is a bicycle race known around the world. It typically has 21 days of racing and covers more than 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi).[2] The shortest Tour was in 1904 at 2,420 kilometres (1,500 mi), the longest in 1926 at 5,745 kilometres (3,570 mi).[3] The three weeks usually include two rest days, sometimes used to transport riders from a finish in one town to the start in another.[4] The race alternates between clockwise and anticlockwise circuits of France. The first anticlockwise circuit was in 1913.[5] The New York Times said the “Tour de France is arguably the most physiologically demanding of athletic events.” The effort was compared to “running a marathon several days a week for nearly three weeks”, while the total elevation of the climbs was compared to “climbing three Everests.”[6]
The 2004 Tour rides the Champs Élysées
The number of teams usually varies between 20 to 22, with nine riders in each. Entry is by invitation to teams chosen by the race organiser, the Amaury Sport Organisation. Team members help each other and are followed by managers and mechanics in cars.
Riders are judged by the time each has taken throughout the race, a ranking known as the general classification. There may be time deductions for finishing well in a daily stage or being first to pass an intermediate point. It is possible to win without winning a stage, as did Alberto Contador in 2010; this has occurred six other times. There are subsidiary competitions (see below), some with distinctive jerseys for the best rider.
Riders normally start together each day, with the first over the line winning, but some days are ridden against the clock by individuals or teams. The overall winner is usually a master of the mountains and of these time trials. Most stages are in mainland France, although since the 1960s it has become common to visit nearby countries.[7] Stages can be flat, undulating or mountainous. Since 1975 the finish has been on the Champs-Élysées in Paris; from 1903 to 1967 the race finished at the Parc des Princes stadium in western Paris and from 1968 to 1974 at the Piste Municipale south of the capital.[8]
[edit] Origins
This article may overuse color, making it hard to understand for color blind users. See the category page and WP:Colors for guidelines.
The roots of the Tour de France can be traced to the Dreyfus Affair, a cause célèbre which divided France at the end of the 19th century over the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, a soldier convicted – though later exonerated – of selling military secrets to the Germans. Opinions became heated and there were demonstrations by both sides. One was what the historian Eugen Weber called “an absurd political shindig” at the Auteuil horse-race course in Paris in 1899.[9] Among those involved was Comte Jules-Albert de Dion, the owner of the De Dion-Bouton car works, who believed Dreyfus was guilty.[10] De Dion served 15 days in jail and was fined 100 francs for his role at Auteuil,[11] which included striking Émile Loubet, the president of France, on the head with a walking stick.[9][10][12]
The incident at Auteuil, said Weber, was “tailor-made for the sporting press.” The first and the largest daily sports newspaper in France was Le Vélo,[13] which sold 80,000 copies a day.[14] Its editor, Pierre Giffard, thought Dreyfus innocent. He reported the arrest in a way that displeased de Dion, who was so angry that he joined other anti-Dreyfusards such as Adolphe Clément and Edouard Michelin and opened a rival daily sports paper, L’Auto.[15]
The new newspaper appointed Henri Desgrange as editor. He was a prominent cyclist and owner with Victor Goddet of the velodrome at the Parc des Princes.[16] De Dion knew him through his cycling reputation, through the books and cycling articles that he had written, and through press articles he had written for the Clément tyre company.
[edit] Birth
L’Auto was not the success its backers wanted. Stagnating sales lower than the rival it was intended to surpass led to a crisis meeting on 20 November 1902 on the middle floor of L’Auto’s office at 10 rue du faubourg Montmartre in Paris. The last to speak was the most junior there, the chief cycling journalist, a 26-year-old named Géo Lefèvre.[17] Desgrange had poached him from Giffard’s paper.[18] Lefèvre suggested a six-day race of the sort popular on the track but all around France.[18] Long-distance cycle races were a popular means to sell more newspapers, but nothing of the length that Lefèvre suggested had been attempted.[19] If it succeeded, it would help L’Auto match its rival and perhaps put it out of business.[20] It could, as Desgrange said, “nail Giffard’s beak shut.”[21][22] Desgrange and Lefèvre discussed it after lunch. Desgrange was doubtful but the paper’s financial director, Victor Goddet, was enthusiastic. He handed Desgrange the keys to the company safe and said: “Take whatever you need.”[23] L’Auto announced the race on 19 January 1903.
[edit] First Tour de France
The first Tour de France was staged in 1903. The plan was a five-stage race from 31 May to 5 July, starting in Paris and stopping in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Nantes before returning to Paris. Toulouse was added later to break the long haul across southern France from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Stages would go through the night and finish next afternoon, with rest days before riders set off again. But this proved too daunting and the costs too great for most[24] and only 15 entered. Desgrange had never been wholly convinced and he came close to dropping the idea.[25] Instead, he cut the length to 19 days, changed the dates to 1 July to 19 July, and offered a daily allowance of five francs to any rider in the first 50 who had won less than 200 francs[25][26] and who had averaged at least 20 km/h on all the stages.[27] That was what a rider would have expected to earn each day had he worked in a factory.[28] He also cut the entry fee from 20 to 10 francs and set the first prize at 12,000 francs and the prize for each day’s winner at 3,000 francs. The winner would thereby win six times what most workers earned in a year.[28] That attracted between 60 and 80 entrants – the higher number may have included serious inquiries and some who dropped out – among them not just professionals but amateurs, some unemployed, some simply adventurous.[17]
Desgrange seems not to have forgotten the Dreyfus Affair that launched his race and raised the passions of his backers. He announced his new race on 1 July 1903 by citing the writer Émile Zola, whose open letter in which every paragraph started” J’accuse …” led to Dreyfus’s acquittal. Establishing the florid style which he used henceforth, Desgrange wrote:
With the wide and powerful gesture that Zola lends to his ploughman in La Terre, L’Auto, a journal of ideas and action, is about to send out over France those tough and uncomplicated sowers of strength, the great professional roadsters.
—[29][30]
He continued:
From Paris to the blue waves of the Mediterranean, from Marseille to Bordeaux, passing along the roseate and dreaming roads sleeping under the sun, across the calm of the fields of the Vendée, following the Loire, which flows on still and silent, our men are going to race madly, unflaggingly.
—[31]
So far so good 🙂
are you filibustering the blog, Boris?
Re: KuhnKat (Jul 29 15:16),
No… because a) I don’t know how to do that and b) I have no idea what I would learn.
Boris– That’s quite a long comment!
I’m assuming that the problem is that when something (I don’t know what) occurs, too much memory is accessed and things are shut down.
Lots of things happen that aren’t done directly you or me. For example, the cache plugin periodically creates a cache to create a static file which you and I load to view a blog. ( If you don’t make these, every single access of the page runs all the php to create the page– so it accesses the database, fishes out the post, fishes out the comments etc.)
When I have the subscriptions comment running, posting a comment will eventually cause email to be sent out. But I think that’s set up as a cron job.
I’d been hoping to use phplot to autogenerate plots on the fly here, and tested it out at a “super secret no traffic” blog (showing my weight during my diet.) But it was when I put that up that the errors began. Because of the way dreamhost shuts things down, the memory problem could theoretically have been that too much memory was sucked up on a that blog when a ‘bot hit it. Then, Dreamhost would kill all my processes — even here.
I lost 70 pounds in 5+ months. Gained about 40% strength over same duration on all lifts except calves (so more than 70 pounds of fat was lost).
Dieting rocks. Way more important than climate blogs.
Some people on the boards and forums find me trollish though. I kinda got a following too though. I encourage people but also am brutally honest. Some like that, though.
TCO–
Good going. We need before and after pictures. . .
Thanks, Lucia. I got em. They’re frigging dramatic. Have shown them before, but not right now.
Good luck with your program. Huge salads are the way…fill that tummy with rabbit food. Nutrisystem boards rock for discussion also. totally motivational to see people transform themselves. Body is most important thing in life.
So we don’t get to see pics? Drat.
What plugins do you have installed?
Lucia, trace would be pointless in this case, I realise, due to the multi thread environment.
Debuggers actually track things like how much memory the process is using. the problem again is that there are multiple threads so unless you got lucky and picked the correct process early it could take quite a while.
It should be relatively easy for the staff at your the Blog host to use a resource monitor to identify which process is at fault. I guess they are telling you the process and you don’t know which thread? That is what the debugger can help with, but, you would probably need to be logged onto the server as Admin to run it and it would interfere with other processes. Your host probably doesn’t want to invest the time and effort to help as it can be a rather intense job.
Much easier to tell you to use trial and error to fix it.
I imagine you have already done a web search for tools written specifically for the blog environment that might help you with identifying the problem?
Since the “contact Lucia” link does not work, I’ll ask here. Are you going to post the results of the last two weeks of July Arctic sea ice contest soon? 🙂
Kuhnkat
They don’t provide this service. The process is “php”, which doesn’t narrow things down at all. It means it’s something that is called by WordPress, or more generically, something to do with the blog.
Nope. You are assuming I would know how to do the appropriate web search, or could figure out how to use the tools after I found them.
Don B. Tomorrow. Today is the first– but Sunday, so I’ve been doing other things. 🙂
Lucia,
Try paginating the comments. When I try to read a long thread, it takes a very long time to disply. The server is executing a php session the entire time and soaking up resources. Ordinarily, long threads aren’t a problem, but your host could have php or sql restrictions that cause these delays.
I just copy the comment before submitting it… got too tired of retyping comments
ccc–
Thanks, I’ll look at paged comments plugins.
The problem is supposedly memory not a limit on sql or php. I don’t think fishing out the comments to display is memory intensive. It does make pages slow to load, but I think that’s a different issue.
Since the issue is memory, adding another plugin may make memory worse rather than better.
Try getting rid of troll control. If I feel the need to drunkpost will let you know ahead of time to turn it back on.
If you have users with slow connections (as I do), the php session will stay active until the page finishes loading. On a long thread with, say, 500 responses, this will take a really long time, assuming it finishes at all. At any given time you have a lot of visitors waiting for a page to download, which means a lot of simultaneous sessions, thus a lot of memory used.
Also, you might see if there is a newer version of your theme. Theme authors make bug fixes all the time, and you never know what kind of bugs they might correct.
cce–
I didn’t know that. I’ll look for the threaded comments plugin. That might help especially if it’s robots hitting pages with long threads.
Lucia,
Quick point. It’s comment pagination (e.g. X comments per page) not comment threading.
CCE–
Yes. I understand. I accidentally said threaded, even though I knew you meant paginatin. Comment threading plugins sometimes very CPU intensive, so I wouldn’t risk adding comment threading.
Today, I’m trying preloading cache. That might actually fix things by eliminating CPU and Memory usage on pages real people almost never visit but robots do hit.
I abhor the threading. And Voice of God commentary. Keep it linear, keep it equal. make it easier to see what is new.
TCO–
I also hate threaded comments, but many other people love them. I don’t like Voice of God (VOG) commentary and think it needs to be kept to an absolute minimum. When VOG is combined with heavy moderation it’s even more obnoxious than otherwise.
I left a (short, even-tempered remark) to the effect that Ross McI’s recent paper was way too narrow to be a good Nature, Science or JSA paper and that I question his perspective if he didn’t realize that. In addition, it was poor tactics and he is to blame for much of the delay in publishing his paper.
It did not make it through moderation.
Several other remarks complaining of how peer review abused Ross have made it through.
I love voice of god comments. It makes it a lot easier to find the response of the owner of the sandbox we’re playing in. Keeps things tidy and easy to find.