You may have seen a nasty Error 500 for the past two or three hours here, and this is the second time I’ve had this kind of trouble. Site up, MySQL up, stuff looking OK, except that everything related to Wordpress, including the admin area, dies returning an error. It turned out that the culprit was… Wordpress’ Cache.
Apparently, there can be sometimes a stale lock file in wp-content/cache/ that prevents everything from running normally. In my case, I’m using WP’s internal cache but not the WP-Cache plugin, but it seems this problem affects also WP-Cache users. The stale lock is actually preventing things from running so well that every process just timeouts and dies.
Today’s lesson : when your Wordpress blog starts to behave weirdly and not responding, simply delete wp-content/cache/.
thought, on 31/May/07 at 1:25 pm # :
How can I use the WP internal cache?? I don’t have that option / directory.
replied, on 31/May/07 at 7:49 pm # :
Ron » the internal cache is part of every WP installation, hence the name "internal" :) Its directory is wp-content/cache. In order to make use of it, and to reduce the number of queries on your site, you may need to add the following to your wp-config.php :