Hi Rebecca, 🙂
It’s interesting you say you’re hosting with WP Engine and you’re seeing Gateway Errors. We had another customer that is in the same position as you, with the same problem. They run 90+ websites on Shield and this is their only site showing the errors.
The WPE team again pointed to autoloading. We explained to our customer and this is not what causes the problems you’re seeing. Certainly since 90 other sites don’t show this Gateway Error. Our client did share another error they’re seeing and they’re running WooCommerce and this is more likely to be the issue as it’s hitting access denied errors when trying to read files that they appears they shouldn’t be:
[2024-05-02T14:46:38.759504+00:00] PHP Warning: parse_ini_file(/etc/php/8.2/fpm/php.ini): Failed to open stream: Permission denied in /wp-content/plugins/woocommerce-square/vendor/apimatic/jsonmapper/src/JsonMapper.php on line 130
[2024-05-02T14:51:15.571001+00:00] message repeated 3 times: [ PHP Warning: parse_ini_file(/etc/php/8.2/fpm/php.ini): Failed to open stream: Permission denied in /wp-content/plugins/woocommerce-square/vendor/apimatic/jsonmapper/src/JsonMapper.php on line 130]
Are you also running the “Woocommerce Square” plugin (I don’t know the name, just the slug of the plugin).
For some reason WPE support staff are pointing to the autoloads. This isn’t likely the problem… a gateway error is a critical error in the web host and will likely populate the logs. My suggestion is to respond to the support staff and ask them to provide you with any errors, not “guesses” about the state of the site, which is what they’re doing.
If your autoload is too high and beyond their ability to handle, then you wouldn’t be able to load your WordPress site at all… since autoloads are on every page load.
There were some changes brought into Shield to optimise options storage which would ultimately reduce autoload size, but the post-changes-cleanup isn’t in the Shield plugin yet as we want as many people to complete the upgrade to 19.1 as possible before we clean-up old data.
So to summarise, I understand you’re being told something by WPE support, but it’s a good idea to push back and ask them that, since their hosting is throwing out Gateway Errors, their hosting should also be logging this and they should point to the actual errors logs they’re seeing.
We’ll probably include some cleanup of the older Shield data options in our next release, but again, we’re highly doubtful that this is the problem and it’s interesting that only WooCommerce + WP Engine are the only reports of this issue.
Let me know how you get on, and thanks for reporting this.
Thanks, Paul.
