We're seeing quite a rash of "500 Internal Error" or "JavaScript failed" errors when trying to post comments, edit pages, and sometimes read sites. This is annoying but not fatal, just redo the same action. I'll explain what's happening and what we plan to do about it.
First, please don't panic: there is no danger to your data, and you won't lose edits or comments. If you get unexpected error messages about page locks when you save an edit, click "try to get page lock" and save your page again.
The problem is somewhere in our application server; every 254th process mysteriously dies, causing an error to hit the next user who tries to make an operation that expects to use that process. We don't yet know what's causing the symptom, which is recent. Presumably something we changed, but there are no obvious candidates yet.
So I'm sorry about the annoyance and the fact that this may worry some of your site visitors. As we have more news on this I'll bring it to you.
Good to know. I'd noticed the increase in errors lately.
In fact, I had a really weird one the other day, which you might be able to tell me the reason for it occurring…
Edited a page, tried to save, and got a "500 Internal Error" message. I discovered that:
Shane Smith
Web Developer and Wikidot Community Administrator
Links: Blog, Wikimated, Editor (STE), Documentation
It sounds like a cache issue (following the server error) but I could not tell you whether on the server, or your browser. If it happens again, try shift-Reload.
Portfolio
i thought it was just me that was getting this.
i have also noticed that it sometimes takes a while before the page info starts to download. once it kicks in, its fine. its just that wait before it happens.
.Goal NHGC
The delay is due to re-executing a slow ListPages when something in the list changed (so invalidated the cache). Re-display the same page again and it's fast. Make a change, it's slow again for the first reload. This can be reduced by making smaller ListPages. If you have particularly slow lists, let me know, it may be that there are indexes we can add to the database.
Portfolio
> If you have particularly slow lists … it may be that there are indexes we can add to the database
order="pageLengthDesc" and order="pageLengthAsc" may be such cases of a missing index — they take many times longer than any of the other order options.
When do you use pageLengthDesc and pageLengthAsc? This is another thing that I can't think of an example situation for… why is it so important to know the length of the page? =/
Shane Smith
Web Developer and Wikidot Community Administrator
Links: Blog, Wikimated, Editor (STE), Documentation
I never used pageLengthDesc.
Have you ever played Scrabble or with palindromes?
> When do you use pageLengthDesc and pageLengthAsc?
Not a lot. If you're looking for all your redirection pages you might use order="pageLengthAsc" to find pages with little content (like a [[module Redirect ...]] only).
Where I actually found that order="pageLengthDesc" was much slower than any other sorting option, was when playing with counting all user profiles and what kind of statistics might make sense. I thought that user profiles with the most content might be interesting and tried order="pageLengthDesc", but in fact profiles with a lot of content are just spam profiles.
> I never used pageLengthDesc.
> Have you ever played Scrabble or with palindromes?
Palindromes, yes. Where is the connection to pageLengthDesc?
You could have one (empty) page per word/palindrome and have a list of words/palindromes order by pageLengthDesc, i.e. by word/palindrome length, then by page_name.
please help it shows mepership via is not available what to do
If you are attempting to join blog.wikidot.com, new membership has been disabled. You do not need to join the site to do anything anyway :) Everything can be done with a Wikidot account, which you already have.
If you want to watch the site for new changes, you can do that from the link in the sidebar :)
Shane Smith
Web Developer and Wikidot Community Administrator
Links: Blog, Wikimated, Editor (STE), Documentation
Is it linked to all of that?
This looks like a database exception due to lost connection. Not related and not serious: reload the page. But if we see it happening again, we will investigate.
Portfolio
the same error every one else has had for the past few hours.
the devs have been working on it
.Goal NHGC
It's not much the "500" error that's annoying the users of my sites but how slow is the site to load!
Are they related?
Any hints of when it could be sorted?
A conclusion is what you reach when you get tired of thinking