White Screen After Updating *Random* Plugins

  • timsilva_

    (@timsilva_)


    8 years, 9 months ago

    Hi there!

    For the past ~3 months, I have been experiencing a chronic, random issue where updating a plugin from the standard update page (/wp-admin/update-core.php) causes my ENTIRE WordPress installation to go to a white screen. My developer has been trying to setup a logging system to debug it, but he hasn’t been able to identify the cause just yet. This bug doesn’t fix itself, and it can only be fixed my restoring the database. Oddly, if I (1) download a backup of the database, (2) run a plugin update that randomly sparks this bug (try me, this is RANDOM. It isn’t a specific plugin. I do them one-by-one, and every so often, an update with make every page just show a blank white screen), and then (3) I restore the database back to before the plugin update, it will not only fix the site, but it will also successfully show the plugin that I updated as up-to-date. So when I restore the database (not the database + files), it successfully shows the plugin attempt that broke the site as a successful update. I am totally confused by this bug, and my developer hasn’t had much progress in figuring it out.

    We are running WordPress on a custom nginx setup on Digital Ocean with Redis caching turned on. Before that, my site was on a Media Temple Shared Pro plan with Apache. While that setup didn’t have these white screen issues, it was painfully slow.

    Has anyone experienced this random-blank-white-screen issue from plugin updates before? Any guesses as to what it could be?

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • abletec

    (@abletec)

    8 years, 9 months ago

    Hello, timsilva, & welcome. Well, I have more questions than answers for you at this point, for which I apologize, but:
    1) How much memory & hard drive space does your droplet have? How big is your database?
    2) What sort of errors are present in your MySQL, php, & Nginx error logs?
    3) Have you tried setting wp-debug to ‘true’ in your wp-config.php file? Note that’s a security risk, so set it back when you’re done, but it might prove helpful.

    Caching is something that can also be problematic. You may wish to disable it while debugging this. Permissions/file ownership may also be the cause of such issues. Ensure that all WordPress files are owned by the webserver group. If owned by a different user, that user should also be a member of the webserver group. Be sure file permissions are set correctly.

    You may also wish to go to a default theme & see if this occurs. Also, you may be having a plugin conflict. Again, checking the error logs & setting wp-debug to ‘true’ may help reveal if that’s the case.

    These kinds of problems are just devilish to troubleshoot because of their intermittent nature. Hopefully the suggestions here will provide at least a starting point.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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