Support

July 29, 2019 at 3:30 am

I have contacted our senior server admins to check the issue with the cPanel icon.

I’m assuming this is something unrelated to this thread?

>> Also, please send Error Logs from yesterday if possible.

Additionally we could not trace any recent error logs for the site

Unfortunately, that reply doesn’t mean your site isn’t throwing errors. Have they confirmed the site/server is set to actually log errors?

If you add this code to your sites wp-config.php file:

https://eventespresso.com/wiki/troubleshooting-checklist/#wpdebug

(Replace the line that has define( 'WP_DEBUG', false ); in your config file with the code above)

That tells your site to log any error/notices/warning to /wp-content/debug.log so if anything is thrown from this point it should show in that file.

Please advise on what we should do at this point? We are approaching a busy sales period, so I’d like to resolve this ASAP.

This isn’t something I’m able to reproduce, are you able to consistently reproduce the above? If so can you provide the full steps to do so.

July 29, 2019 at 4:57 am

I was just showing you our hosting provider’s response to the question regarding error log checking via cPanel (so yeah, somewhat unrelated). But they did confirm that we are set up to receive error logs…

Ok, but the first part of that response is concerning an icon within cPanel, not error logging.

It’s fine that it is unrelated, I just wasn’t sure if I was missing something in the above.

So I assume I should just wait to see if it happens again and then check the debug file?

Correct, it’s not something we normally see/expect with registrations and I’ve ran through various testing on a couple of sites to try and reproduce but so far have been unable to.

Something to be careful of though is the code logs every notice etc thrown, so that error log file can grow quickly and is available publicly.

July 29, 2019 at 6:51 am

Ok, in that case I will keep it enabled for a few more days and I’ll get back to you if it happens again? Otherwise I’ll just reverse the code and continue as normal?

Pretty much yes, you don’t want to run in debug mode permanently and logging to /wp-content/ isn’t the best way so it’s wise to keep an eye on it.

If you start getting multiple instances of the above, enable logging again until you get another and see if any errors are thrown.

Ideally, your host would log errors outside of publicly accessible areas and then you can view those from your control panel. It seems odd that there are 0 warnings, notices, errors of any kind logged when you’re getting the above. The problem is, because you haven’t seen the error logs you don’t know if they are simply dismissing what is there because they are notices, or they just don’t log them.

In short, you don’t know what error logging is enabled on your site and that makes stuff like this hard to troubleshoot (if in fact, the logs would have helped, we don’t know).

The other question would be… should we look at upgrading our hosting to handle more volume? Or is that not entirely necessary?

Unfortunately, that’s not a question I can answer for you.

Easy site is different and each event setup is different so it depends on many factors.

What makes you think you may need to upgrade?
Other than the above are you having other issues?

July 30, 2019 at 6:14 am

Ok, I see. Will do!

The last thing they responded on my support ticket was this: “Please be advised that you can access your logs and error logs from cpanel >> Metrics.
The errors will not appear until there is an entry in the log file.”

So I can only assume it has been set up correctly. But it is odd that nothing has been appearing. Anyway, I will carry on keep an eye on things…

You can actually test that fairly easily, create a new PHP file in the root directory of your site and force a couple of errors in that file.

Use a variable without actually declaring it:

echo $something;

When $something has not been declared will throw a notice:

PHP Notice: Undefined variable: something

Or trigger_error("Fatal error", E_USER_ERROR);

Will throw a fatal error when you load that page.

So load the page, then view their logs and see if there’s an error.

As for hosting… I’m just bring it up because you mentioned that the server might not be handling all our requests properly.

Yeah, as mentioned your site timed out multiple times when I was running through test registrations which may or may not be an indication that there is an issue server side (I don’t have enough info to say for sure).

I’ve just run through another test registration now and its much better, but again that may mean the server is failing to process your requests when under load.

What type of hosting are you using currently? Shared?

August 2, 2019 at 11:57 am

Even after editing the wp-config file, I’m still not receiving any errors in the debug log…

It may be that the debug.log file isn’t writable by the filesystem. You could check with your web host and inquire about the file permissions for wp-content/debug.log, is WordPress allowed to write to it?