Troubleshooting Server Overload Problems
For the past 3 days, I’ve been troubleshooting some server problems, specifically MySQL database errors. First of all, my web hosting plan hosts 10 sites, 5 of which are WordPress blogs. I have been observing the behavior of my WordPress blogs for the past two months. It’s not easy to troubleshoot 5 blogs especially if they do not behave the same way according to error logs. Each blog presented a different set of problems to troubleshoot which got me so confused. Damn!
Yes, error logs. They can be so helpful. If you’re self-hosted, they are located in your blog’s root directory. Download them (if you have more than one blog) and see what’s going on with your sites’ processes. They can tell you something you cannot see on your blog’s interface. You may not know it but your blogs could be screwed already so better check your error logs to see what’s wrong and when did the errors occur.
On the other hand, internet users trying to access your site/s may see an error message like this:
For internet users, the error message will prompt you to wait for a while then refresh the browser to see if the page loads successfully. For the webmaster or site owner, the error message will state possible causes of errors that could be preventing users from opening web pages in your site. These errors could be:
- account has used more than its share of CPU in the last 60-second sliding window
- account has too many concurrent processes running simultaneously
- account has consumed too much memory
- your site was recently very busy trying to run inefficient scripts
What I did to prevent the server overload problems from reoccurring involved cleaning up my sites of javascripts and images. I deleted some ads on the front page and single post pages of some sites. Some sidebar widgets were also removed. In general, I did some tweaking with my templates. House cleaning was in order until I committed a foolish mistake - I accidentally deleted, in one of my blogs, the whole themes subfolder under the wp-contents folder. I only intended to delete some themes that I was not using and do not intend to use but because I was not paying enough attention to my FTP transactions, the whole subfolder was deleted. The results were devastating.
First, the blog won’t load due to an error in the header file. I tried to copy another themes folder (from one of my blogs) but to no avail. The blog won’t load still. I then decided to re-install WordPress in cpanel but I had to delete the old installation. I backed up my MySQL database in the phpMyAdmin section before deleting the old installation. Now, the realizations after re-installation of WordPress:
- The restored MySQL backup did not contain all files that I needed. Specifically, the uploaded photos in wp-content/uploads were not saved in the backup. The links were ok but since the new installation of WordPress came without anything in that directory, the site showed no photos when loaded. Now here comes the difficult part. I had to edit about 100 posts and re-upload all photos (about 200 in number) to that site (The Reporter) to get it back to normal.
- File attachments (when uploading photos) did not load properly, hence, users trying to access my site got an error message stating that the “file does not exist” or they will simply saw a blank page like I did. This happens if you configure your photos to open a new page when you set their links as FILE and not as PAGE.
- Seo-wise, search engine robots (e.g., Yahoo Slurp and Googlebot) that cannot access your site successfully could de-rank your articles or remove them from their index. This happened to my site BLOG2LEARN two months ago when Yahoo Slurp was not able to access that site 3 times in a row. All my files were de-indexed from Yahoo’s database for about a month. Now that I have fixed the errors in my sites and search engine robots can crawl my sites successfully again, BLOG2LEARN is back in the index of Yahoo.
Lessons Learned and Tips
- Backup your MySQL database regularly especially if you update your sites frequently. Once a week would be nice if you post two or more articles per day on a single blog.
- Export your WordPress site onto your local hard drive using the export function in WordPress’ admin section (Manage -> Export). The XML file to be exported (which you can import to a new WordPress installation if you will reinstall the files or migrate to another server or host) will contain all posts, comments, categories, links and plugin configurations (but not the plugins). So, backup your plugins and all files uploaded to your server under the wp-content/uploads directory. You can use any FTP software (like Filezilla) to do this.
- Do not overload your server with too many photos/images loading in web pages especially those with large sizes. Regulate posting articles with photos and scripts embedded in them.
- Clean up your blogs regularly for clutter. Remove widgets and other files in your header, sidebar and footer that you’re not using. These will only add up to the load on your server and your pages may not load properly. Worse, search engine robots will not index your files/posts and might even de-index your site if loading problems persist.
- Check your error_log.log file regularly to see what problem your server has experienced in the past. These could be a variety of things like fatal MySQL database errors, parsing errors, loading errors, RSS errors, etc. You can download your error log file using FTP and open it in Notepad, Wordpad or Microsoft Word.
- Regulate the number of categories and post tags. These consume disk space and bandwidth too because they are loaded in the browser evertime your posts/pages are accessed by users.
Future Plans and Other Recommendations to Prevent Server Errors and Server-related Problems
Buy another web hosting plan. This is the reason why in my previous article I stated that I intend to buy another web hosting plan very soon. It’s true, I am not experiencing any server problems for two days now but who knows if the old problems will come back and haunt me without me knowing it? I’d like to prevent things like these to happen again by relieving my server of additional load. My sites are growing in terms of number of posts, disk space consumption and monthly bandwidth consumption.
Funny it may seem but my space consumption as well as my bandwidth consumption do not even account for 10% of the total allocated disk space and monthly bandwidth. However, I think this is the most feasible option for now just to make sure I will not spend more time troubleshooting server errors than actually optimizing my sites for speed and search engine rank.
For sites with high traffic (say, 5k and above pageviews), a cheap web hosting plan is definitely not fit. A dedicated server is highly recommended. For this site and other sites I own, I won’t go for this option yet. My sites do not receive this amount of traffic daily so I will still opt-in for cheap web hosting plans.
If you want to get updates on Nursing Researches, Nursing Board Exam Results, Nursing Articles, Nursing Education, Health and Health tips, and other informative articles in this site, please subscribe to my Free RSS feed. Thank you very much!
Tags: Blogging, Server Errors, Technology, Troubleshoot server errors, WordPress, Wordpress error
Kaya ka naman pala nawala sa ere ng matagal, Kuya.
Buti ka nga at marunong kang magtrouble shoot ng sarili mong PC.
Ako neto, nakadepende sa mga technicians na diko alam kung anong kinakalikot sa unit ko.
Puede bang ikaw nalang din mag-ayos ng computer ko? Hehehehe!
Scotty’s Princess’s last blog post..Affordable Eyeglasses at Zennioptical
[Reply]
jessie reply on July 11th, 2008:
Ellaine,
I just got back online. My DSL was off yesterday again then my wife. Ok you may send me the ailing parts of your computer and I’ll fix them. lol!
jessie’s last blog post..Sexy Photo of Diana Zubiri in FHM July 2008 Edition
[Reply]
Whew! Nosebleed ako fren grabeh but it’s okay because this post is very much helpful. Now I see why you’re so silent fren, namiss tuloy kita. Anyway I don’t got that high traffic too so go go for cheap hosting parin hehehe. Grabeh trabaho gawa mo fren, naloka ang beauty ng lolo ano? kaya nga ako bawas2x sa mga ek2x embed java eh at simple editing lang gawa ko sa FTP ko..minsan nga nagkagulo widget ko sa pag modify ko ay buti nalang nakuha rin sa pagkutingting..Mabusisi fren at time consuming. Glad your back.
[Reply]
Joy,
Yup you’re right. It’s so tiresome and time-consuming. Grabeh ang pagod ko up to now. But so far, my sites are ok now. I’m back to normal starting now.
jessie’s last blog post..Before I Knew How to Make Money Online
[Reply]
I backup my MySQL database once a month or depende kung maalala ko haha. I can imagine how busy you’ve been troubleshooting server problems. Time consuming talaga pero syempre hindi mo naman pwedeng tigilan hangga’t di naa-ayos, sabi nga ni Mike Enriquez, di kita tatantanan, haha! Buti nga ikaw you can do the troubleshooting yourself, pero sa iba, kukulitin pa nila ang host nila, parang ako!
Amor’s last blog post..Friendster Spam Message
[Reply]
jessie reply on July 14th, 2008:
Fren,
Naku di mo lang alam kung anong parusa ang inabot ko. Grabeh. I can’t sleep, eat and do other things. You’re right. You can’t stop until your server is in good shape. All your sites are practically affected if you stumble upon server problems like this because you can’t work on anything else while troubleshooting.
jessie’s last blog post..Miss Universe 2008 Winners and Results
[Reply]
[...] my 5th plan in 3 years and I could say that I have learned so much in server administration and troubleshooting server overload problems. I have also learned how to deal with a failing internet connection despite the fact that I already [...]