Site Hiccups

My site has recently been trying to emulate a yo-yo. Apologies to everyone who’s been trying to access it and seeing either 404 errors or Internal Server Errors. Believe me, I’m more annoyed than you are by this.

This is a really tricky issue. I wanted to blame my host but I don’t think they are the cause. Something is corrupting one of my database tables which ends up causing php5 processes to hang and eventually consume all my RAM. I don’t know what it is and it’s not easy to find, particularly since I’m without internet at home and have to troubleshoot from work. That means no ssh terminal access and only a web-based ftp access and the php webadmin. Fortunately they were enough for the restore.

I am nevertheless getting mighty pissed off from all of this, particularly since this is not something easy to troubleshoot. I was lucky to get a quick reply to my question on the Worpdress fora but I haven’t received any more help on this. For some reason I suspect Intense Debate as it the one with the most common connections to the DB. Particularly since after disabling it and repairing the tables, the problem mostly went away. I was about the write a very exasperated support ticket to them but I wasn’t very sure so I left it for a bit.

I fully expect this to happen again soon and hopefully I’ll have a better idea where to look then (and hopefully some ssh access).

Still quite exasperated.