Greetings everyone, this is the Angry Systems Administrator. As you know, I did an upgrade to to WordPress that went horribly wrong. The site was offline for over an hour as I tried to figure out what happened and how to get it to come back up.
Eventually, I was able to. Now for the reasons the site went down. Several of the plugins, several of them no longer supported, crashed. One that is used everywhere, called Jetpack also went down throwing memory errors. I was able to turn off the plugin, along with all the others, and then went through them, turning them on one at a time.
When I hit one that caused the site to go down, I changed some settings and was able to bring the site back up. When I came to Jetpack. It took the site down hard again. However, I knew what the issue was and disabled it again. This was rather annoying, since we have been using that plugin for years.
I ended up going to the Jetpack support forums and posting what happened. There was some back and forth and testing on my part, and they were able to come back with a recommendation. It turns out the out of memory error was caused by the PHP settings being set to low. I contacted our hosting service and they were able to bump them up to the levels recommended by the support forum.
I believe that the PHP settings may have been the cause of a number of issues wit some of the plugins we’ve utilized in the past, including the Disqus commenting system. As an experiment, and ready to move if it took the site down. I reinstalled it and activated it. It didn’t crash and is now up and running. The main issue is all of the original settings appear to have gone or are no longer valid. I’m working on those now, but have a ways to go.
I would like to thank the Jetpack support forum and our Hosting service for figuring out the solution and how to correct it, and then implementing it. In the mean time, I’ve still got a lot of back end work I need to take care of.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
~The Angry Systems Administrator~
A website I maintain went down last week for basically the same reason. My IT support for the backend told me it was a plug in, but didn’t specify which one.
You should ask them which one, or ones they found.