Support

March 16, 2020 at 7:21 am

Hi Joost,

In short, we can’t reproduce this so it’s rather difficult to troubleshoot. We’ve tried multiple times with various setups and permalinks remain working just as they should whenever we run tests on this.

So, our conclusion would be that the PHP memory limit is not a factor in relation to our problem after all.

To be honest, I’m not sure how you’ve come to that conclusion just from the above.

In your previous thread I posted this:

Now having said all that, I’ve been looking at your site at various times and at the time of writing your site has been sitting at a real-time memory usage of 2GB (77% of your total, spiking up to about 85%) and it hasn’t dropped in some time. This leads me to believe the problems does indeed lie with memory. Something on your server is consuming all of the available memory and continues to do so, bumping the memory available helps, until again it is all consumed.

Did you investigate why the memory usage was spiking/climbing?

De-activating EE and re-activating EE (and its add-ons) is all well and good, but if memory is spiking and the request to rebuild/flush permalinks can’t process it would cause issues like this with said permalinks.

From the above, you’ve checked the memory usage after the issue has occurred, de-activated and noted the usage, then re-activated and noted usage, but none of that seems to be when the issue is actually occurring, correct?

Do the permalinks stop functioning at a specific time in the day?

If so do you have any daily scheduled tasks running on the server which would run roughly around the same time the issue occurs?

—-

What may help is to add a snippet to the site that writes a log entry saving the date & time, all of the rewrite rules and a call stack to a file. It isn’t going to fix anything but should give an idea of what is calling to flush the rewrite_rules and when/if they are missing from the site.

There are a few steps you’ll need to take to set that up if you’d like to try it?

You’d basically need a function to write to a log file that you leave active on the site until the permalink issue happens again (hopefully within 24hours from the sounds of it) then send that over to me to have a look over. Note that file may end up huge pretty quickly depending on the notices/warnings and other errors are thrown.

(Again we are guessing as to what the cause is as we can’t reproduce on multiple different setups, so just to be clear, this may well end up being a wild goose chase but I think its worth a shot)

March 18, 2020 at 2:57 am

I could try to disable those plugins one by one and look for any change in the logfile. Could you tell me what change to look for exactly in the logfile?

Sure, I’ll reply in a private thread with specifics for your site after this one but you would disable the plugin then view the log file and note the ‘last’ entry containing the rewrite_rules wait a few seconds without visiting the WP Settings page in the admin (load a front end page of the site a couple of times) and just refresh the log file, if new rewrite_rule entries were made in that time, it’s not that plugin.

Repeat until it stops adding rewrite_rule logs on each request and you’ve found the plugin.

(See next reply for specifics relating to your site)

Or I could send you the PHP files that contain the flush_rewrite_rules function. Would that be sufficient for you to see what’s going on?

Whilst we can do that, code review isn’t covered under support so it would require support tokens to cover the time spent doing so.

March 27, 2020 at 6:29 am

When you say it’s blank, do you mean it’s a whitescreen or no products? (meaning you can see some/all of the theme output but not the products themselves)

If it’s a whitescreen it likely means the function is running over and over again then running out of memory.

Load shop, then check your servers error logs, any errors?

March 27, 2020 at 8:36 am

Hmm, strange.

The write_log() function at the beginning of my plugin writes to the error log but only when WP_DEBUG is enabled so the difference between the above just when you set:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );

Or

define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );

Correct?

I have the latest version of Woo and my plugin enabled on a test site, loading the shop works fine for me with it enabled…. but, I also know that my site isn’t constantly flushing permalinks so that function should basically be doing nothing there anyway.

So, a couple of things to try on your site.

Comment out/Delete THIS LINE and THIS LINE.

Its possible something is catching the exception (shouldn’t be but not much else I can think of).

Rename ‘write_log’ to something else throughout that plugin, for example I would use tw_ee_write_log just to be 100% sure nothing else is declaring a write_log function before mine that does something different.

March 30, 2020 at 5:43 am

Seems strange that Woo would be causing this, I don’t get the same issue on the site mentioned above.

Are you sure it is not a template loading within your theme within Woo? Or another plugin hooking into Woo?