Might need to do this in stages… So first question: Are you using a WordPress caching plugin? if so, and if you have not already, then you must exclude the forum page (using the forum home page slug) from all caching options which you can do via any cache plugin option panels.

After this we can move to the next thing. Go to the forum admin > Options > Global Settings and try turning OFF the options to cache and compress CSS and JavaScript – if they are indeed turned on.

Yes there is a wordpress caching plugin, I think I have now excluded the forum page, but I do not know what the ‘slug’ is exactly. Is this the same as the forum page permalink?

I have also turned off the options to cache and compress CSS and JavaScript.

And? Any change or does it still break? If still breaking can we have a link to your forum page to see how things are loading?

hmm.. seems worse as I can’t access them now, several others reported problems also

http://antaresscorpions.co.uk/forum-2/

At the moment I’m just receiving this:

502 Bad Gateway

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nginx

To quote my small http handbook…

(502) This code indicates that the server (or proxy) encountered invalid responses from anothr server (or proxy).

All of which really means that you need to be talking to your hosting support in the first instance…

I went to our host first but some time there were no issues they could see and pointed me towards the forum, as the problem was coming after a post or PM was made.

They blamed SP for your 502 http ‘bad gateway’ error? How do they work that one out?

A 502 is caused (as I said above) by your web server making a request to a third party server and getting, basically, an invalid response. This may be permanent, temporary, or even intermittent if the reason for it is exhausted resources on the target server.

So this is likely to be something your site loads that is not stored on your own server. So it could even come down to an attachment someone has placed in a post – for example. And that IS just an example.

Your host should maintain logs of all these transactions and therefore should be able to locate what was being requested when the status was returned. It is impossible for us to know what that might be…

No, the 502 bad gateway error I only received yesterday immediately after going through the cashe fixes you mentioned, I have no idea if it is connected or coincidence. I had not had that error before, and have not had it since. Incidentally I also got this error message from the forums at the same time as the 502 one yesterday 

OK – understood.

Well another big possibility – especially if this is happening on ‘long’ posts – is that you are running out of php memory. You should be able to see what you have available in the forum admin > toolbox > environment panel. While it is possible to run WP and SP in 64MB it will also depend on what other plugins are active etc. Obviously the more code – the more RAM that is needed to process the scripts.

Alternatively another question would be how long are these ‘long’ posts. Is it possible that your php environment is set up so that too much information is being posted for it to handle. What, exactly, do you mean by ‘long’?

Once again – both of the above error conditions would show up on your php error log on your server.

The post length I was testing with was approx 650 words, not huge but longer than 95% of posts (guess).

It’s not breaking every time a post this long is made, just sometimes. 

PHP info below, I included everything in the environment panel just in case:

Ok – that should be enough.

I see you have well over a 1000 topics and over 8 and a half thousand posts. So has this been a problem since day 1 of using it? Or is this something more recent?

Oh – I see that it is also still using the wp cache plugin. So it still needs to be turned off from the caches. This can cause this sort of effect and others.

Its a recent problem, probably started about a 2 weeks ago. 

Should I disable the W3 Total Cache program entirely? I made exceptions for the forum by adding the forum permalink to the exceptions box in the cashe program.

There is something else odd that happens but I am not sure if it is related. When ‘thanking’ a users post the opening page of the website gets overlaid on the forums post that was just thanked. occasionally forum functions stop working as well, but normally the post just gets obscured. Refreshing the page seems to clear it up though.

Edit: I just installed the prune database plugin and deleted a bunch of topics.

If I had understood this to be a recent problem on an older and established forum I would have asked the obvious and proper question first. which is – what changed? Something must have changed. WordPress theme? Updated plugin? New plugin? Server/problem-with-post-edit-buttonosting change?

WordPress theme has not changed.

There have been various plugin updates recently, I try and update all plugins as soon as I see there is a wp/sp update, but honestly I have not kept track of them. Is there somewhere I can find the updated date in word press and simple press?

I don’t think that there were any new plugins at the time of this problem first happening. However the W3 Total Cache and XCloner were added most recently, probably a couple of months (best guess) before the problem was first reported.

Serverl/Hosting has remained the same.

Around the time of the problem first starting I was doing a fair bit of changing of the forums by the way of merging forums, deleting older and unused forums/topics and creating new forums/groups. I assumed at the time this is what was causing the issue.