Blank white page – lots of questions here but no answers?

stevation
(@stevation)

16 years, 10 months ago

I’ve spent hours reading through all the threads I could find here on the blank white page from hell problem, and I’ve seen a few people say this is very common, inferring that a known fix is described somewhere. But I can’t find anything here that unravels this mystery!

I wrote a new post today and created a new category at the same time, selecting that category and an existing one for the new post. When I hit the publish button, I got the white screen from hell. Nothing on my WP site will respond now. I can still access other files on my site, but WP is broken.

I tried adding the following line in my wp-config.php file as was suggested in one thread:
define(‘DISABLE_CACHE’, true);

But it didn’t change anything.

I tried deleting all my plugins by FTP, but that didn’t change anything, so I copied the files back up to the server.

I’ve checked my WP database through PhpAdmin, and my new post is in the database, as is the new category.

Something like this happened once before — I was simply writing a comment and when I submitted it, my site went blank for a day. Then it just reappeared. When that happened, another WP blog I had in the same domain wouldn’t work either. But they both came back the next day. That makes me think that something about WP messed up my host’s PHP functioning or something, because why would it affect a separate installation with its own set of directories and all?

I actually have three separate WP installations — two in one domain and one in a virtual domain that is really a subdomain off the first. And now two of the blogs aren’t working while one is.

Can someone please shed some light on this? If there is some wisdom to be found in stuff already written here, I haven’t found it! Since this seems to be common, can’t we make some kind of sticky post about it to help others find the solution?

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

Samuel B
(@samboll)

16 years, 10 months ago

Could be a PHP memory issue.
Ask your host to bump it from 8M to 16M.

Thread Starter stevation
(@stevation)

16 years, 10 months ago

I suppose I’ll upgrade from 2.1.3 to 2.2 and see if I can fix it. This problem didn’t exist *for me* when I was using 1.5 or any of the pre-version-2 versions. There must be something in the code since version 2 that is more susceptible to breaking down or less robust. I hope it’s something that was fixed in 2.2, but it sounds to me like the problem isn’t really understood yet.

Does anyone have a better explanation of why so many people are getting the white screen from hell problem?

Thread Starter stevation
(@stevation)

16 years, 10 months ago

OK, I went through the upgrade process by deleting all my files (except for wp-content and other files that the instructions say to keep) and uploading the 2.2 files. It’s still not responding. If I delete the wp-config.php file, it will respond by telling me I need to create one, but once I upload the config file, it just gives me a white screen when I try to run upgrade.php or anything else with it.

I submitted a support ticket to HostGator, which hosts my sites. We’ll see what they say. I asked them to increase the memory allocation and reset whatever seems to be blocking wp from running. It seems to me like the server is blocking it for some reason. I have three blogs on this server, and one other got disabled when this happened, even though I did nothing in that installation. The third is still working. Weird.

Thread Starter stevation
(@stevation)

16 years, 10 months ago

HostGator agreed that it looked like a php memory issue, and they got it running again. I haven’t been able to get them to tell me how they got it running again or what specifically was broken or needed to be reset. I wish they would help me understand what to do next time this happens.

I have bumped up the php memory for each of my blogs by adding the following command in .htaccess in the main blog directory for each of them:

php_value memory_limit 16M

Hopefully, that will prevent if from happening again. But I don’t really know for sure if that was the sole problem.

rubenortiz
(@rubenortiz)

16 years, 4 months ago

I had the same issue when i moved one blog to another host. I needed to modify php.ini and change php_memory from 8M to 16M. I restarted apache and worked well. Interesting issue.

Bye bye

thehealthyskeptic
(@thehealthyskeptic)

16 years ago

I am also having this problem! Unfortunately, I don’t understand the solutions proposed in the last two posts. Can someone give me more specific instructions about exactly where to find the files I should modify, and where to put the code?

Thanks.

Paul McGuinness
(@paul-mcguinness)

16 years ago

I can confirm that creating a file called .htaccess in the WordPress folder with the single line:-

php_value memory_limit 16M

Fixed it for me!

This is useful if you are on a shared server and the ISP doesn’t want to change PHP.INI settings (mention no names… Fasthosts!)
manturafs
(@manturafs)

15 years, 11 months ago
this can happen for a number of reasons. the best thing to do is to figure out what is causing this problem. For me, it was a plug in. to find what is causing the problem, create a web page called error.php or test.php or whatever you can remember. Paste the following code into the page:
```
<?php
ini_set('display_errors','1');
ini_set('display_startup_errors','1');
error_reporting (E_ALL);

include('index.php');

?>
```
upload that to your blog and navigate to the page with your browser. it should show you the page causing you to error (and subsequently a blank/white screen)