I'm not sure whether this is really an Update Status issue, but it seems only to affect the functioning of the Update Status module, so I am posting here.

Yesterday I began receiving the following error (presented on an otherwise white screen) when I tried to manually fetch information about new module updates (i.e. when I went to admin/logs/updates and clicked "check manually"):

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare timer_start() (previously declared in /home/davinci/public_html/includes/bootstrap.inc:116) in /home/femrich/public_html/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 122

I found that I could run update.php and then immediately, one time only, I was able to run the manual check with no problem. If I ran manual check again, however, the same error would reappear until, again, I ran update.php. And the condition persists now.

There is nothing I did on my site, so far as I know, that caused this problem. Update status was working normally in the morning, but in the afternoon, not. I had not changed anything on my site between those moments.

My concern and suspicion is this: I am on a shared hosting provider, and I observe that the error message refers both to my account (femrich) and to what appears to be another users account (davinci). I am wondering whether this might be some server side error, rather than a Drupal issue. Can anyone offer insights on this?

Comments

Mojah’s picture

Mojah commented

Hi Femrich,

I wonder...do you have an opcode cacher installed on your server? eaccellerator or xcache? I'm also experiencing these errors on two VPS accounts. One one account I have Wordpress and a Drupal multi-site install. The function timer_start() is defined in both WP and Drupal. On the other server I have a newsletter management program that also defines a function with the same name as Drupal. I suspect that there may be a conflict with the function being cached somewhere. I noticed that you have two separate Drupal installs.

Here's the function in the api: http://api.drupal.org/api/function/timer_start/5/references
and here's my post about it elsewhere
http://drupal.org/node/170425

I'm almost certain it's not an update status issue.

Mojah’s picture

Mojah commented

Ok I just noticed that you are on a shared hosting platform. Try this: Send an email to support and ask if they are using an opcode cache like xcache or eaccellerator...or APC. This will help determine if the opcode cacher is the problem.

dww’s picture

dww
we/he/they
commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

No reply in over 4 months, must not be a problem anymore.

femrich’s picture

femrich commented

My apologies for neglecting to report back on this. I contacted my hosting provider and they fixed the problem, but despite following up, I could never get them to tell me what the problem actually was. So everything is working fine now, but I haven't a clue why. But in any case, I think it is safe to say it wasn't an Update Status issue.

Kreadus005’s picture

Kreadus005 commented

I was experiencing this error myself.
It was hard to reproduce, but in your error log PHP may indicate that it cannot load a module because a dependant module is missing or is unloaded.

Fixing that dependency issue will cause the re-declaration problem to go away. At least, it did for me...

Good luck!