Thread

OUCH!  I just received this e-mail from my host:

—-
[...]
We investigated this, and what we found was that over a period of a
few minutes, your site’s PHP scripts made over 58,000 attempts to
access files in this directory:

/f1/content/bladam/public/expeng/[systemdir]/cache/db_cache
[...]
—-

Any ideas what could cause that?  And, more importantly, how I can address this situation?

Thanks much in advance!

Regards,
Adam

Turn off the EE database caching: Admin > System Preferences > Database Settings

Nevin,

Thank you very much for that quick and helpful response!  I have followed your advice and disabled database caching.

I hope you don’t mind my followup curiosity:  what would have caused EE to be attempting 58,000 access attempts in just a few minutes.  I get a measly 350 page views or so per day and haven’t had any traffic spikes recently.  Do you think there might have been some sort of hacking attempt?

Thanks in advance for any insights you can offer.

Well EE is only going to generate database queries if accessed, so likely a few things happened, a page or pages on your site were accessed in some way, causing EE to generate page views/queries, you have a template with a tag or group of tags causing a huge amount of data being gathered in some way with a simple page access (have seen people accidentally do things in templates in the forums here generating 1,000’s or 10’s of thousands of queries by mistake), or other factors I am not thinking of at the moment.  Your host should be able to help you with more details, like increased web side activity to your site, or if there are still any of the queries in the cache directory you can open those and likely EE support folks can assist in identifying what generated the queries in EE, ie: weblog tag, search, or other features.

Just a few things I can think of of the top of my head.

Do you have a publicly viewable web form for spammers to pound? Could you make it independent of EE? E.g. if now
it’s at http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/webform , could you try moving it to http://www.yoursite.com/webform.php

Adam, this advice help you any? I don’t think I have anything to add to Nevin’s reply 😊

Hi there,

Apologies for the long delay.  Yes, that made my host happy.  But now—and I’m not sure if this is related—it is taking 30+ seconds to load a category page on my site:
Example:  http://www.bladam.com/main/topic/music/

Do you think that’s related?  If so, any ideas?

Go to
CP Home ›  Admin ›  System Preferences ›  Output and Debugging Preferences
Set Debug Preference to 1: SuperAdmin
Set Display SQL Queries?  to Yes

Now, logged in as SuperAdmin, visit that category page.

What does it produce?

Thanks for the assist, silenz.

Adam, do silenz’s suggestions help?

Unfortunately, the space available to reply here is too short and (equally unfortunately) the SQL output is too long.

So I put it here:
http://www.adamlasnik.net/data/temp/sqloutput.txt

Thanks for taking a look!

Doesn’t look too bad at first glance. Nothing running wild.
But clicking around a bit on your site the high load time seems to be exclusive to the music sub-category.  All other pages seem to load quick. Makes you wonder…

whoa, that *IS* odd.  I hadn’t noticed that the other category pages seem to load pretty quickly.  It’s sad, then, that this music category page is the first one I wanted to link to from my main site :(.

Any ideas of other troubleshooting I could do?

Thanks again for your time with this 😊

Yeah, turn on Template Debugging where you enabled Show SQL queries.
You might narrow down where the bottleneck is.

I’m with silenz here. Let us know how it goes.

I have added a dump of the results here:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/126479/ee-debug.txt

Thank you again for your kind help with debugging!