Website problems – pending final root source cause of the problem

[Rich]

I’ve tried deactivating and deleting BPS Pro on one of my sites but whenever I activate it, it keeps quarantining my .htaccess.  I can’t get it to even save the correct .htaccess when I sftp into the site.  How do I completely disable quarantine so I can get the secure .htaccess to stick?  I’ve even turned off ARQ and it won’t let me put the correct secure .htaccess in.

I’m running WordPress 4.0 and the latest BPS Pro 9.4

[AITpro Admin]

I don’t understand what you are trying to do.  Why did you uninstall BPS Pro in the first place?  Was there some reason for doing that?  I assume you are trying to manually edit files outside of BPS Pro / not using the BPS Pro built-in htaccess File Editor?  It is recommended that you use the BPS Pro built-in htaccess File Editor to edit htaccess files.  Please see the AutoRestore/Quarantine help link below.

These are the standard BPS Pro Troubleshooting Steps:
http://forum.ait-pro.com/forums/topic/read-me-first-pro/#bps-pro-general-troubleshooting

These are the AutoRestore/Quarantine Procedural steps when manually modifying website files outside of your WordPress Dashboard
http://forum.ait-pro.com/forums/topic/autorestore-quarantine-guide-read-me-first/#procedural-steps

[Rich]

I obviously tried using the built in editor.  I’ve been using BPS-Pro for some time.

The symptoms started when I started getting a ton emails telling me that it had autoquarantined a file.  Turns out the file being quarantined over and over was htaccess in the root.  I then saw the standard message that my root htaccess was unprotected so I went to try to apply the secure htaccess.  I would save it, would get a temporary message that my root htaccess was now protected and then it would revert itself and be unprotected again.

You ask me why I would try editing from outside the program and the answer is that BPS Pro wouldn’t let me change the htaccess.  It wasn’t until I completely uninstalled BPS pro that I could edit htaccess again without it forcing it to revert to another version of the file.

What’s strange is that it appears there is no real way to turn off quarantine.  Even with ARQ off, I couldn’t fix the problem.  Something internal to the plugins operation was forcing it to detect a file modification and was even backing up the htaccess file after I had turned ARQ off and deleted all the backups.

I appreciate the security this plugin offers but it sometimes is really time consuming getting everything just right.  Is there no way to make some setting manual (like quarantine) for problems like this?  In your noble goal of making the plugin more user friendly it seems you’ve taken away some control from those of us who would like to turn some features off.  Making quarantine a permanently “on” feature is problematic in this case.

I don’t know if it’s a plugin interaction issue but that’s what’s going on.  Right now I’ve deleted the plugin entirely and removed every trace of bps-pro so when I have time to reinstall it the plugin will be fresh because it didn’t completely uninstall itself but let traces in wp-options that were still there when I reinstalled it so the same symptom reappeared the moment I reactivated the plugin.

[AITpro Admin]

The problems you are describing are not normal. I would like to login to this website and find out what is wrong with this website.  ie another plugin is breaking BPS Pro functionality, server configuration problem or some other similar type of problem.  Create a temporary Admin user account and send the login information to edward @ ait-pro dot com.

[AITpro Admin]

Documentation/Notes:

The root source of whatever problem is occurring on this website are still not known at this time.  BPS Pro is magically working correctly on this site now without doing anything/changing anything, but there are some very unusual things occurring on this website.

The oddest thing:  When logging into this website an old plugin that had been upgraded with a new version of that plugin was displayed as installed on the WordPress Plugins page and deactivated.  Upon revisiting the WordPress Plugins page that old version of the plugin disappeared.

It appears as if the backend of this website is being cached.  Logically that is the only explanation I can think of that would explain seeing an older plugin as still being installed on this website.  The website performs very sluggishly in general.  The user will continue to check the list of possible causes that were provided to him directly via email.  Pending final Topic title name change when the root cause of the website problems is discovered.

Other notes:  Several other sites on this particular host are working normally so the problems are isolated to this one website.

[Rich]

Again, thanks for looking into this.  I thought that it was odd that there were two versions of a Plugin file but then I looked more carefully after you pointed that out.  The instructions to install Event Espresso were to deactivate Event Espresso 3 and then upload (or install by zip) Event Espresso 4.  I assumed that the old version of the plugin was over-written but EE4 was installed alongside EE3.  Even though EE3 was deactivated, it was still showing in the plugin list.

Incidentally, I installed EE4 on another site and it didn’t cause the root .htaccess problem.

As I noted, I thoroughly uninstalled BPS Pro (including removing all traces of BPS from the database – even traces left after deleting the plugin).  When I contacted you yesterday I had a fresh install and it started to quarantine root .htaccess right away.  In my fresh install I did not use the automatic setup wizard but enabled everything manually.  I purposefully did not turn on ARQ but intended to leave it until the last.  As soon as I generated the secure root htaccess and tried to enable bulletproof mode the symptom returned.  In fact, even though I had not backed up any files yet and ARQ was off, BPS had backed up autohtaccess so something was quarantining htaccess.

I went to the exclude files and folders section and selected exclude WordPress files.  In the file path I simply typed .htaccess and saved.  I then tried to apply Bulletproof mode for root htaccess and this time it worked.

When you checked my site, however, htaccess was not in the list of excluded files.  I can’t account for that but I know it now works.

On a final note, we interacted on why my site is really slow during plugin updates and when I click on the link when updating plugins and I think I may know why.  My theme for this site (and a few others) has a lot of files.  I’m literally backing up about 1600 files and that is while also excluding theme cache files.  I think some problems may be caused by the fact that my host has timeout issues whenever the plugin is trying to back up that many files after every plugin or theme update or install.  It will time out after a certain amount of time.  Even though it’s not ideal, if I exclude the themes folder from ARQ do you think that may resolve some of the odd problems?  Another way of asking is this:  what happens to BPS Pro when it doesn’t get through the process properly after a plugin or theme update?  It seems like it’s updating the backup files and if the number is really high then it seems bound to cause issues.

[AITpro Admin]

The thing is what I see is the something is wrong with the site itself or some part of the site and is not being caused by BPS Pro.  I have been doing this a long time, BPS Pro has been around for 3 years, there were a couple of documented cases where ARQ was causing slowness do to user mistakes in how ARQ was setup.  I checked that on your site and ARQ is setup correctly.   Occaisonally I come across sites that have problems like this one does.  Unfortunately, there is not a common solution in all of those cases.  Those problems ranged from database corruption to server configuration issues to file corruption and lots of other causes.

If you want to eliminate BPS Pro then yes you can exclude the themes folder from being checked and/or turn things off and benchmark test your site, but honestly I am pretty sure that the root cause of the problem is something else.  It is very quick and easy to turn things on or off in BPS Pro so this can be done without wasting a lot of time.

One thing I did not check that has been documented to cause latency/slowness, but ONLY at the exact time the ARQ Cron is running (ie at 2,3,4,5,10 minute intervals) is when ARQ is checking extremely large backup zip files.  Backup zip folders and files should be excluded from being checked by ARQ.  This does not include the ARQ backup files themselves and would be a problem issue in this scenario:  you have another backup plugin that creates zip backup files that are 500MB+ in size and that backup folder is not excluded from being checked by ARQ.  On your website the slowness problems were contstant for me.  ie when the ARQ Cron was not doing anything and when the ARQ Cron was running at Cron run intervals so I did not check that.

[Rich]

Maybe I didn’t articulate the problem well.

I’m hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites and it’s a bit quirky.  Instead of waiting an appropriate amount of time for a website to finish processing it will give an “no available nodes” error.  I actually figured out that I can cause it to continue and the process will finish.

I’ve just now realized that when I updated Plugins, that the ARQ seems to be updating the Backups in the various folders.  For this site in question, the number of files being backed up in wp-content was 1741, which prompted a note from your plugin that the number of files seemed excessively large.  Once I would update a plugin, I would click the link that your plugin generates to click if I’m updating a plugin or theme.  I believe your plugin is then updating the backup files.  When this was happening it took longer than the Rackspace Cloud Sites and was timing out with the error.  In the past, I was just skipping over this because of that error and I think it was messing up ARQ for that site.  I guess I don’t know what the consequence is if the ARQ does not get a chance to update the backups.

Instead of excluding the entire themes folder, I’ve excluded the images folder of the primary theme.  That folder had 1300 images in it so the number of files being backed up in wp-content is now less than 600.  After updating plugins and clicking on the link for your plugin, the process completes and states that everything is updated.

[AITpro Admin]

I believe a “node” error has something to do with Cloud services.

Ok, but you are still looking at symptoms and not the root cause of the problem.  While I was logged into your site I noticed that both the frontend and the backend performance was terrible at all times.  Not intermittently, but constantly.  If ARQ was the root cause of whatever the problem is on this site then this is what I would see – when the ARQ Cron is actually doing something then I would see slowness/latency problems.  Inbetween ARQ Cron run times ARQ is doing nothing and is idling.  ARQ can check 5,000 files in a few milliseconds.  ARQ can check 10,000 files in several milliseconds.  ARQ is designed to handle checking extremely large numbers of files without causing any website slowness and has been stress / torture tested up to checking 50,000 files.  The check on the AutoRestore wp-content folder for excessive files is more of a heads up check then a check that is telling you ARQ cannot handle checking that number of files.  This check is designed to let you know that you probably have a lot of excess files in the wp-content folder that you really do not need to have and can delete.  This may not be accurate in every single case, but here is the primary use case:  A user has 20 Themes installed and is only using 1 Theme.  There is no point in checking Theme files that are never going to be used.  Those Themes should be deleted if they are not going to be used.

[Rich]

Strange because this was the same site that you raved about in terms of performance and responsiveness when I thought it was slow.  I’ll see if Rackspace can see something that’s going on.  Some of my sites are much more snappy and it always seems to relate to the size of the theme.  I wish I had better troubleshooting skills but don’t know what to look for or how to investigate it.

Thanks for your help.

[AITpro Admin]

I don’t actually remember logging into this site in the past, but if I said it was running great then I would be comparing that speed to the other 1,000’s of websites/web hosts/web servers that I have logged into around the world over the years.  The fact that your other sites are performing well/normally is a very important factor in the equation.  That tells you that the problem is isolated to this 1 particular website and is not a general host server problem.

This site is a Live Production site that you probably cannot afford to disable and turn off things to troubleshoot extensively since that would impact visitors to this site.  If it was me this is what I would do.  I would install a Development site with all the same things installed on that Development site and then one by one eliminate things that could be the root cause of the problem.  In other words, reverse engineer the Development website.

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