Pixelpost loading incredibly slow, or sometimes not at all

[franklieu]

Last night I tried to log into my admin panel, and I got this error message:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, support@supportwebsite.com 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.

Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.franklieu.com Port 80

I had not changed anything (last thing I installed was the mosaic addon) and I had only uploaded new photos everyday for a month. When the site does load (about 50% of the time) it loads incredibly slow as opposed to yesterday and everyday before that. Sometimes I get this error message too:

Lost connection to MySQL server during query

I contacted my host (godaddy) and they gave me the standard "nothing is wrong with your site, please clear your cache and cookies, blah blah" and I had already done all that already. I've tried loading it on various computers under different ISPs and they all have the same problem. I'm running pixelpost 1.7.1. Any ideas? Is there a limit on how many photos pixelpost can effectively handle? I remember months ago my archives running a little slow (I have over 525 photos) but it always came through in the end. Argh! Help plz! Thanks

***

Oh it would probably be helpful to add the site in question: http://www.franklieu.com

[lasiate]

Yes i got the same probleme for 2 days now. Very slow or no access to database. Some times the script ask to check my data base settings on this page
http://fiatlux.lasiate.com/admin/ins...hp?view=db_fix
but all of them are good

I have 443 photos, between 400 and 1000 visits and between 20 to 50 comments
per days

Its ok with my others scripts on the same server( oxito.com). I checked my data base and its OK also
I'm running pixelpost 1.7.1
http://fiatlux.lasiate.com/ : pixelpost: not working
http://efm.lasiate.com/: modx cms :working

[Hess]

I read a couple of posts related to problems loading PixelPost over the last couple of days. Strangely enough, my site started to have the same problem (running 1.7.1). After some troubleshooting, I was able to get it to load normally by disabling Defensio. I've not yet gone any further than that in figuring out what is causing Defensio to flake (or if that's a symptom of another, larger problem), but I thought I'd mention it. If you're running Defensio and having problems loading your pblog site, disable it from the add-on screen. I'm curious to know if others having this problem have similar results.

[franklieu]

omg Hess, you are a lifesaver. yeah there is definitely something wrong with the anti-spam programs. i tried to turn akismet back on and the same problem happened. blargh defensio and akismet!!

[Dennis+]

It seems the guys at Defensio have major server issues at this moment and are working hard to get it resolved.

I've contacted them to confirm if this issue is indeed related to the slow loading.

[Dennis+]

Ok, here is the feedback. It should not be of any problem, but obviously it was. So I dug deep in the code and found the cause of the problems. The good news is that it is related to the problems they are having. The best news is you can easily fix it yourself if you want. The best news of them all is that I'm going to fix it in the next release.

Defensio is only activated when a comment is called. However, I've identified the source of the problem, it is the code for the widget.

That code has a cache of two hours, but if the service is down for more than two hours it will repeatedly try to fetch the stats. It will do this on every call, so each time a page is opened. This probably causes the delay we are experiencing.

So, great, what is the fix:
For the latest version of Defensio, open up admin_defensio.php
Look for line 94 (or about):

PHP Code:

// widget support
$defensio_widget = defensio_counter($defensio_conf);
$tpl = ereg_replace("<DEFENSIO_WIDGET>", $defensio_widget, $tpl); 


Change to:

PHP Code:

// widget support
//$defensio_widget = defensio_counter($defensio_conf);
//$tpl = ereg_replace("<DEFENSIO_WIDGET>", $defensio_widget, $tpl); 


[Wyattx17]

I was having a terrible slow problem too. I would get the Internal Server Error 500 sometimes. I knew it wasn't my website because I have a couple sub domains to other locations that were running just fine.

I was able to log into my admin part and saw that defensio didn't have a registered key anymore so I hopped over to their site and it was down. So I disabled defensio and it was snappy as before. Hope their servers get fixed Pronto! The spam was unbearable with out Defensio.

[Dennis+]

http://www.schonhose.nl/2008/06/05/d...own-pixelpost/

[Hess]

Dennis - Many thanks...I'd just tried getting to the Defensio web site and saw from their blog they were having problems. Taking your work around and putting it in place...thanks for the fix!

[Dennis+]

John, thanks for noticing!!