Thread

Greetings.

Just got our web site up and running at:
http://www.greatbigcircle.com

Everything works like a charm on Expression Engine 2.1.0. However, it seems once every day or so the entire site seems to timeout. I don’t get an error message or anything. It just brings up a literal blank page. The entire site. Anything static (HTML pages) not associated with the EE site loads fine.

I contacted Media Temple about this and got this response:

he (gs) Grid-Service uses NFS file systems for the storage segments.  Recently we started looking into disabling “file locking” on storage as a means to improve performance and storage segment life.  Unfortunately, disabling of file locking has affected some functions on site applications, specifically, site applications that require the use of the PHP function “flock()” to carry out certain tasks.

ExpressionEngine is one of these applications.  By default, it requires the use of flock() to create cache files.  EE users on other hosting environments that use NFS file systems have experienced similar symptoms with their sites (the EE forums actually describe much worse symptoms), and have provided solutions for the issue.

The short term solution is to clear your site cache via the EE admin control panel, and allow EE to rebuild the cache.

The following is a link to a particular EE forum thread (with a more permanent solution) that specifically addressed issues with file locking and database query caching:

Caching on shared NFS | CodeIgniter Forums
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/150496/#735762

However, rather than altering your site’s code, you may want to look into your EE cache settings to see if you have the ability to disable file locking within the administrator control panels.

EE forums and possibly (mt) Media Temple user forums will be of better assistance with getting your EE to work properly within an environment that does not allow file locking.

The link they provided wasn’t extremely clear to me – I wouldn’t know where to begin altering PHP files containing the flock() function. Nor do I really feel like blindly tampering with them.

They also suggested disabling file locking within the EE Admin. I don’t know of a way to do this.

At this point, I’m open to any suggestions and guidance. It seems like I’m close to a solution, just a matter of finding the right approach.

Thank you.

There isn’t a method for disabling file locking within EE. A Feature Request would be in order.

What happens if you turn off caching in general?

If you mean “Enable SQL Query Caching”, it was already turned off.

Are there any other options to turn off caching within the Admin?

Try to disable all forms of caching. You can read more about caching in the docs. If that doesn’t help a Feature Request, as suggested by Sue, might be your best option.

Okay I’ve disabled all caching for the while, and will monitor performance for the next couple days. Thanks for your help, and we’ll see how this works.

Let us know what you find out, We’ll be here.

Has there been any change in this situation on the EE side?

I just discovered this thread after moving my site to Media Temple. Feh. I dread moving the site again to avoid this problem.  I contacted Media Temple support and they tell me that the situation is still as described on their end.

Was a feature request ever filed and/or implemented?

I’m running EE 1.7.1

Hi, Barry,

This has not changed and there is not a back-end option for this.  I don’t recall seeing a feature request posted either, but you are certainly welcome to post one now; just be aware that if the feature did get added, it would be to EE 2, not EE 1.

I’ll also make sure to get this issue in front of the devs and see if there’s anything that we can do.

Thanks!

I did follow up with the devs; the only way to get around this right now is to avoid caching, and to avoid saving templates as files.  The devs do have this as something to look at for improvement in the future as well.

I do hope that helps!  If anything else comes up, please do let us know in a new thread.  Thank you!