WP plugin helped fix my Internal Server Error

[rjleaman]

I posted this information a couple days ago just as a sort of aside in another thread but figured maybe it would be useful to put it here, in case anyone else has been getting an Internal Server Error on their self-hosted Wordpress installations.

Here's the story -- and solution:

I had been adding tags to old posts on my Domestik Goddess blog, since many hundreds of posts were published long before Wordpress added the tag feature. Suddenly, I started getting Internal Server Error messages. Even when my blog did load, half the time it wasn't loading with the style sheets so everything looked messed-up. Not good!

It was Sunday evening, so I figured not much point in trying to reach a live person at my web host for tech support...

I went into cPanel and checked my error log. The index.php and wp-cron.php files were showing up repeatedly in the error list, and it said Premature end of script headers every time. But of course there was no way to know what script was causing the problem. So I googled around a bit and came across a plugin called WP-Crontrol.

When I installed the WP-Crontrol plugin on my blog, it showed me what processes were running and what the status was -- and that's how I figured out it was the do_ping that was causing the problem. Every time I'd updated to add those tags to my posts, the system tried to send a ping. There were so many in such a short time, it got confused or something and the whole process hung. There were a couple of stalled do_ping entries in the cron job list, actually -- and as soon as I deleted those, my blog started working properly again. Error gone!

If you ever run into the same situation, you can get the WP-Crontrol plugin here: WordPress › WP-Crontrol « WordPress Plugins

Hope this helps someone!

[myqute]

Never heard of this plugin but thankies for the head-ups. never know if I would run into a similiar problem!

[Nathan]

Very good! Thanks for sharing your experience.