[Dennis Freeze]

This reply is private.

[Dennis Freeze]

I emailed the complete database to you.

[Dennis Freeze]

George,

I sent a dump of the EM_* tables from the database. If you’d rather have the entire database, I can put it on box.com and send you a link.

Regards,
Dennis

[Dennis Freeze]

George,

Just after I hit send on previous message, I got a reply from the ISP. See if this helps….

——————————————————

Right, high CPU usage due to what appears to be run away processes.

As part of the testing we isolated the KOZT website to its own Virtual Apache server. Just to rule out any potential issues from other websites causing loads that may have triggered strange behavior with the KOZT website. This did not stabilize the website and that’s when we were able to determine it was the calendar plugin causing the high CPU loads, MySQL queries and overall site instability.

Scenarios: Involving only the calendar plugin and add ons.

1: Calendar Plugin is active and the add ons disabled. The Calendar will eventually start consuming CPU resources by opening php-cgi connections over and over in addition to MySQL database connections until the connection limit per MySQL user of 200 is reached, forcing the site offline.

2: Calendar Plugin is active along with the calendar add ons. The Calendar will start consuming CPU resources almost immediately. Again by opening php-cgi connections over and over while querying the MySQL database until the connection limit on the MySQL server is reached, forcing the site offline.

As it stands now, the website is isolated from the rest of our web cluster.

[Dennis Freeze]

George,

Hosting provider is Mendocino Community Network, http://www.mcn.org.

According to the client, there are 975 events with listings out to Jan 2017. During the summer months, they usually list 15-20 events per day on the weekends. Their calendar covers the county plus music events all over Northern California, and it’s a prime tourist location.

Advanced Post Manager, 4.1
The Events Calendar, 4.0.7
The Events Calendar PRO, 4.0.7
The Events Calendar Category Colors, 4.4.5
The EVents Calendar: Community Events, 4.0.6

There’s no real custom coding interacting with the calendar, just using shortcodes in the frontend, and the backend administration interface from you guys. It is a custom theme (I wrote it), but it has minimal interaction with the calendar — just using shortcodes.

If you want, I can export the relevant tables from the database and send them to you. I can also provide a login on the site if it comes to that.

I’m still waiting to hear from the ISP. I told them I want to turn the plugins back on later in the evening when traffic is low, and use Query Monitor to see if anything is out of whack. What else should I try out? I’ll also turn on the WordPress debug.log and see if anything gets caught in there….

Thanks,
Dennis

[Dennis Freeze]

Brook,

I haven’t used the WP Transients API, and I’m really surprised that it uses the options table instead of dumping things into a separate table. WordPress really does not like having that table get so large: I couldn’t even see the /wp-admin/options.php page — it was just blank. And I kept getting random white screens after updating things in the backend, although refreshing the page always restored it. A bit scary, though. All back to normal now….

Thanks for the caching tip about double-minified assets, and for sticking with me to figure this out.

Regards,
Dennis

[Dennis Freeze]

Brook,

OK, that makes sense. I’ve been using WordFence to block malicious logins and stuff like that, and to somewhat throttle non-Googlebots. Blocking the bots seems like a good idea, although it’s always a shifting target. Several other sites of mine have been recently subjected to merciless pounding with bad login attempts, and they use their botnets to keep coming at you. It hasn’t been quite as bad with this site, but there’s a lot of bad traffic.

Limiting the future-month requests seems like a really good idea — I can’t imagine limiting that to a couple of years would impact more than a few sites, and then it wouldn’t be a big deal. I vote for it!

So, your message seems to be missing a link or something: “Then, I would clear the transients using a strategy like this. That will shrink your table back down to a reasonable size.” I’m thinking there was something between those sentences, not the old “left as an exercise for the reader” ploy. 🙂

I really hope I don’t have to drop the caching — we have a lot of events on this site, and a lot of other custom code, so everything that helps speed is good. I’m going to put in one of the caching plugins soon — I guess I could disable your cache then, right?

Thanks,
Dennis

[Dennis Freeze]

OK, this definitely signals an error…. If you decide it may be coming from a plugin conflict, I’ll have to plan the whole turn-off-all-plugins-and-add-back-1-at-a-time thing…. Most of the site’s traffic is between 8am-8pm, so I need to wait until later to do this kind of stuff. Hopefully, it won’t come to that.

[30-Jul-2015 19:58:23 UTC] WordPress database error Unknown column ‘eventStart.meta_value’ in ‘where clause’ for query SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS DISTINCT kz_posts.*, tribe_event_start_date.meta_value as EventStartDate, tribe_event_end_date.meta_value as EventEndDate FROM kz_posts LEFT JOIN kz_postmeta as tribe_event_end_date ON ( kz_posts.ID = tribe_event_end_date.post_id AND tribe_event_end_date.meta_key = ‘_EventEndDate’ ) LEFT JOIN kz_postmeta AS tribe_event_start_date ON kz_posts.ID = tribe_event_start_date.post_id AND tribe_event_start_date.meta_key = ‘_EventStartDate’ WHERE 1=1 AND kz_posts.post_type = ‘tribe_events’ AND (kz_posts.post_status = ‘publish’ OR kz_posts.post_status = ‘future’ OR kz_posts.post_status = ‘draft’ OR kz_posts.post_status = ‘pending’ OR kz_posts.post_status = ‘private’) AND eventStart.meta_value >= ‘2015-07-27 02:00:00’ ORDER BY tribe_event_start_date.meta_value DESC, tribe_event_end_date.meta_value DESC LIMIT 0, 250 made by WP_Posts_List_Table->prepare_items, wp_edit_posts_query, wp, WP->main, WP->query_posts, WP_Query->query, WP_Query->get_posts

[Dennis Freeze]

George,

I’m talking about the filters from the Advanced Post Manager….

Thanks,
Dennis

[Dennis Freeze]

Brook,

OK, I’ve heard back from the music player support team, and they asked me to clone the site to a subdomain, and then they will debug it on there. I passed along your info about how your plugin handles rewrites, since that could help them narrow it down quickly.

It’s going to take a few days to get things set up — the ISP is a small one that doesn’t provide a cPanel i/f, so I have to wait for them to clone the site. I’d appreciate it if we could leave this ticket open for a week or so while the music player guy works on it. I’ll report back if they find anything they can’t fix.

Thanks,
Dennis

[Dennis Freeze]

Brook,

Are there any common points of conflict with other plugins? You’ve probably experienced other conflicts, and maybe there’s something else going on. It certainly seems like a slam-dunk as far as being in the URL rewriting area, but who knows? There could be an error upstream of that action, and the rewrite could just be the point where the failure shows up….

It seems like your plugin does a really good job of playing by the rules, so I’m guessing there are not many instances of conflicts — but helping narrow down the problem is good, and I might even get lucky with it if there’s a common pattern.

Thanks,
Dennis

[Dennis Freeze]

Brook,

OK, I’ve flushed the permalinks cache, so hopefully that error will go away.

Regarding the transient 404s, I am not sure how to proceed. I really don’t think I can change the permalink structure for the site, especially to revert back to using the most crude version. When I switched this site to WordPress, I had to do a lot of redirects for old pages. Adding another set for everything is a huge load, and I’d still have the ugliest links.

I’ve never poked into how WordPress handles rewrites. I think I’ll see if anybody from the other plugin has encountered this before I start mucking around in the rewrite mechanism. Do you have anything written up about how your plugin handles rewrites?

Thanks,
Dennis

[Dennis Freeze]

OK, I turned off all plugins and reverted to the 2015 theme. I found 2 things causing 404 errors:

1. An apparent bug in your code is resulting in some bad links when clicking on an event in the monthly calendar. If you look at http://www.kozt.com/calendar, it’s the “Little Lake Grange” event on Jan 26. The generated link for this page is http://www.kozt.com/event/2015-01-25/, and this results in a 404 error. This happens with everything else turned off, using the 2015 theme. The event itself looks just like all the others….

2. I believe that the 404 errors are because of a conflict with another plugin –the Background Music Player. This shows up when a 404 error is generated — either because of the bad link in the previous example, or occasionally when clicking on http://www.kozt.com/calendar/community/add/ to submit an event. When the WP_DEBUG flag is true, then I get the same error message with either cause of the 404:

Trying to get property of non-object in /data/www/html/k/kozt.com/www/wp-content/plugins/background-music-player/public/background-music-player.php on line 631

This plugin is vital to the site — it plays the radio station’s live stream. Any ideas on how to figure out the situation? The referenced file does a bunch of includes, though, so I can’t easily tell where the error happens.

I’m pretty sure this is it. With everything disabled except your plugins, I could not make the error happen. Whenever I turn on the Background Music Player plugin, it happens pretty quickly when I click on the Add Community Event link.

Thanks,
Dennis

p.s. Do you guys need a login and Adminer to look at things in the backend? Have you heard of any previous issues with the Background Music Player? http://docs.circlewaves.com/background-music-player/

Here’s what was logged to the Debug Bar with the 2 different kinds of 404s:

Logged in Debug Bar when a 404 error occurred when trying to go to http://www.kozt.com/event/2015-01-25/
Request:
event/2015-01-25
Query String:
tribe_events=2015-01-25&post_type=tribe_events&name=2015-01-25
Matched Rewrite Rule:
event/([^/]+)(/[0-9]+)?/?$
Matched Rewrite Query:
tribe_events=2015-01-25&page=

From <http://www.kozt.com/event/2015-01-25/&gt;

Logged in Debug Bar when going to /calendar/community/add/
Request:
calendar/community/add
Query String:
pagename=calendar%2Fcommunity%2Fadd
Matched Rewrite Rule:
(.?.+?)(/[0-9]+)?/?$
Matched Rewrite Query:
pagename=calendar%2Fcommunity%2Fadd&page=

From <http://www.kozt.com/calendar/community/add/&gt;

[Dennis Freeze]

Brook,

This error didn’t happen at all on my development server — it only manifested when I went live on the production server. 🙁

I’m planning to do the 404 testing tomorrow afternoon, Tues Jan 20th…. I had to clear a time with the radio station to have their site down for a while….

Dennis

I’ll start here: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/fixing-http-404-errors/

[Dennis Freeze]

Brook,

Well, I’m not using any caching plugins, so that’s definitely not the cause. I tried regenerating permalinks and clearing browser cache, but no luck.

No Javascript errors happen when it occurs, either.

I’ll have to do the disabling plugins thing during off-hours, so it may be a day or 2 before I can get to it.

Thanks,
Dennis

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