By lionheart8 on

Hi
For the last 2 weeks or so, I have noted that navigating to the admin panel or any pages within it (e.g. to the modules page or from there to any other, such as content types) has become extremely slow, mostly taking several minutes to load (!!).
Clicking on any link outside is different.
Also since around 8th May, Status report has not been functioning & trying to do it manually after many minutes of waiting brings the error message:

Unable to fetch any information about available new releases and updates

On Available updates page, today:

Last checked: 2 weeks 4 days ago (Check manually)

Though it is several days since this happened, the slow loading - errors such as:

*Warning*: MySQL server has gone away query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, variables, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (1, 'php', '%message in %file on line %line.', 'a:4:{s:6:\"%error\";s:12:\"
user warning\";s:8:\"%message\";s:120:\"MySQL server has gone away\nquery: SELECT info FROM system WHERE type = 'theme' AND name = 'tapestry'\";s:5:\"%file\";s:67:\"/home/habaris1/public_html/abc/modules/system/system.module\";s:5:\"%line\";i:965;}', 3, '', 'http://www.mysite.com/admin/settings/site-maintenance', 'http://www.mysite.com/admin/settings/site-maintenance', '132.230.239.4', 1242408821) in */home/habaris1/public_html/abc/includes/database.mysqli.inc* on line *128*

filling a whole page have resulted.

I suspect these errors are connected.

A non-Drupal site using the same account has also since that date (8th May) been experiencing some problems, that seem to be related.
A script supposed to carry out some function has been failing most of the time & in the report it is supposed to email, the cron daemon has been sending this error message:

2006: MySQL server has gone away

Error occured. Please see the logs or report an error to the administrator

I had never got any such error from Drupal, even on unreliable free host servers in about 3 years.
There have been no changes to the sites in this time, except for the installation of the emfield module, recently.

So my questions:

  1. What could be causing Status report to be failing, from the errors I pointed out?
  2. Why could admin panel navigation have turned excruciatingly slow?
  3. How could these problems be solved?
    I have contacted the webhost (www.justhost.com) 2 times, but they say the servers are working fine.
  4. If the problem is server-side, what could it be?

Thanks in advance

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

matkeane’s picture

matkeane commented

Hi,

There are a bunch of suggestions on this page: http://drupal.org/node/186384

The slowness is probably down to the update status module - if your host is blocking outward bound http requests, the process may never complete and the MySQL connection is dropped in the mean time. If you can't get to the module admin page to disable it, you could change the status field directly in the database.

You may also see another problem where the watchdog table fills up, if the cron job that truncates it fails because of the update status connection failure. You can get to the point where cron can't complete because the process of truncating the watchdog table times out so, again, emptying the table in the database might sort you out.

As the first comment in that linked post says, there are a variety of reasons why you might get this error, but update status is a good place to start looking. For this reason, I only activate update status on my local test site, where it doesn't matter if things slow down.

There's also a handbook page about tuning MySQL if it turns out to be something else: http://drupal.org/node/259580

lionheart8’s picture

lionheart8 commented

Hi
That seems to have been the culprit.
The problem had become extreme of late, including loooooong minutes of waiting for any admin related page to load and sometimes total failure to, instead error messages that where pages long.
It is a mystery why this started in the fast place. I have not done any changes to the site in many weeks.
A couple of weeks ago, on some days, there would be some warnings about failure to get the update status of a couple of modules, but that was all.
I have otherwise used Drupal for 2, 3 years, mostly on relatively poor free host servers but I have never had anything like this.
So how does one know the update status especially if one has several dozen modules??

Meanwhile, regarding using the devel module -
Does it only print the different statistics below the page only when on the front page? I want to see the same statistics when I am on the admin pages but nothing similar is printed.

Thanks for your help

lionheart8’s picture

lionheart8 commented

After disabling that module for a while, I decided try re-enabling it again and see what happens.
Surprisingly, it did not slow the admin pages of the site again & in fact when I tried to check for updates, it fully co-operated like I have known it to do before all this started.
There were 14(!) modules to update after many weeks of being unable to do so.
So I will keep it that way for now.
Quite a mystery why this started in the first place.