Unsought Input

Have you been having trouble reading Unsought Input lately? You’re in good company – I’ve been having trouble writing for it.

We’ve been having issues with MySQL to the point of hanging connections and pleasant, but not very helpful WordPress error messages. It’s nice that user-friendly errors are built-in to WordPress, since you never want to give users cryptic, blue-screen-of-death style errors. But I needed to get to the root of the problem.

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Hitting strange errors when trying to execute long-running PHP processes, like large file reads, generating static HTML pages, file uploads, or CURL calls? It might not be just bugs in your code.

Are you getting pages that seem to load, but then nothing shows up in the browser? When you go to a page, does your browser sometimes ask, “You have chosen to open something.php which is a : PHP file. What should Firefox do with this file” or possibly “File name: something.php File type: PHP File Would you like to open the file or save it to your computer” Do you get internal server errors at random intervals?

Depending on what you are trying to, you could be running into timeout issues, either in PHP, in a particular library, in Apache (or IIS or whatever web server you use), or even in the browser. Timeout issues can be a real pain because you don’t run into them very often and they don’t result in clear error messages.

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Is your blog starting to bog down? Getting nasty emails from your ISP about overloading the database server? Since most blogs are read far more often than they are updated, caching your pages can result in a real performance improvement.

Wordpress has some very basic object caching, but you really need to be able to cache whole pages to see a big benefit. Luckily there is a very good page-caching plugin, WP-Cache.

If you are on a Linux or Unix host, installation is pretty straightforward.

Now, what if you are on a Windows/ IIS host and using ‘date and name based’, almost-pretty permalinks? No sweat. Okay, a little bit of sweat.

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