[pmwiki-users] pmwiki hangs when editing

Petko Yotov 5ko at 5ko.fr
Sat May 8 18:16:06 CDT 2010


On Tuesday 04 May 2010 21:44:22, Simon Olsberg wrote :
>  keep trying to submit the edit, but I can usually narrow it down to a
>  particular word with the new text that causes the problem - if I remove
>  that word, or replace it with a different word, then I can then submit the
>  edit without a problem. However there doesn't seem to be anything special
>  about these bits of text that lead to the problem nor can I discern a
>  pattern to the text that causes the hang among the few cases where it has
>  happened. In fact, the same text might already occur elsewhere on that
>  page without an issue.
> 
> So firstly, does anybody have any idea what might be going on here.
> 
> But assuming not, could you suggest a route I might take in trying to track
>  down what is happening on the server in these instances = where in the
>  pmwiki code should I start looking to perhaps add some tracing statements
>  in an attempt to debug this?

Hello. This could be very difficult to debug. 

This could come from PmWiki (unlikely), some recipe (possible) or your 
server/filesystem installation.

Some servers have mod_security blocking posts containing words considered 
potentially dangerous -- because you say the same word appears elsewhere on 
the page, I don't think mod_security is your problem.

Your server may experience very high load (from your wiki or from other sites 
it hosts). If too many processes try to write to the hard disks, a page write 
may be very slow and even hang sometimes. If your server uses network-attached 
disks (like many shared hostings) there is an additional delay when writing 
the page. 

On the PmWiki side, things may hang if you have two types of recipes -- those 
writing to files on every page read and write (TotalCounter...) which place 
additional load to the filesystem, and those performing complex processings 
(replace on save...) on large texts, which may need too much time.

Finally, I remember there were hanging problems with some PHP5 beta builds on 
Windows - upgrading to a newer stable or beta PHP version *and* to a recent 
PmWiki version could fix things.

Good luck,
Petko



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