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White Screen Of DEATH

Doesn't that sound familiar? Well, maybe not the entire screen, only the entire browser window, but only that is more than enough. I was throwing together an ordinary post for my blog yesterday with a few images, around 1300 (images), when WordPress suddenly refused to update the page... the process ended up with a blank page, over and over... and over. So I visited the main site and AAAAAAAAAARGH, blank!

I tried one of my other sites, it worked. I tried logging in via FTP, it worked. I tried logging into the admin panel again, that worked too. What didn't work however was the rest of my goddamn website. I spent maybe an hour messing around with the .htaccess file and searching the net for solutions but they wouldn't give me any. The ones they did give were not relevant. I figured out that what caused the problem was probably the script trying to display thumbnails for all 1300 images at once, a simple memory overload.

Why it had no effect on the admin panel is a mystery though.

How did I solve it? Well I just resisted the urge to do something about it and did something else, and the problem fixed itself. It's happened before, it's just the 500 Internal Server Error without the 500 Internal Server Error message typed in the browser window. I disabled that. So now you get a nice blank screen when things fuck up instead. Much better, right? So it fixed itself, not. I woke up this morning and thought everything would be ok when I visited my website this time, but guess what, it was blank. Instead of disabling a few plugins from the admin panel I then proceeded to move them all into a new directory, reload the site, and voila, it worked! Took a couple of seconds to move the plugins back in again and now everything is smooth and perfect. Why didn't I do this yesterday already? I always think clearer in the mornings.

Anyhow. What to do to prevent that things like this ever happen in the future? Well there isn't much I can do. Optimize the database maybe. Maybe go through my plugins. Maybe check for collisions in post/category slugs, etc etc. Nothing that really does anything in the long run, sure everything will run better until they stop running completely, and that's when there really is a problem. Hope WP does something about this issue, cause I can't.

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