I’m still hav­ing trou­ble with the MySQL data­base for this blog. It’s set up just like every oth­er site we have, but I keep hav­ing odd time­outs and MySQL errors with this instal­la­tion. I was­n’t even able to add books to Now Read­ing for most of the day!

I read about some­one else who seemed to be hav­ing a sim­i­lar prob­lem, and tried his fix—a cus­tom copy of wp-db.php. That did­n’t help, so I revert­ed to the stan­dard file.

Right now, I’ve got almost every plug-in and wid­get dis­abled, and the posts I wrote on Tues­day and Wednes­day are final­ly vis­i­ble. I guess I’ll have to go through the plug-ins, enabling them one by one again, to see if one of them is the prob­lem. (I haven’t had any error mes­sages indi­cat­ing a plug-in prob­lem, but…)

Last night I real­ized that some­thing was Wrong with this blog. Sev­er­al days of posts had­n’t, and I could­n’t even leave a com­ment on an old post. The error mes­sage I was get­ting (data­base access denied) made no sense.

The MySQL infor­ma­tion had­n’t changed. I tried chang­ing the data­base pass­word and updat­ing the settings—nope, no good. I could view the db in php­myad­min, and it was just fine. I could back up the data­base there, and change things, and I was using the same login infor­ma­tion. So why could­n’t Word­Press do any­thing?

We’ve been using 1&1 for at least a year or so now, I think, and haven’t had any real com­plaints. I hate call­ing any­body’s tech sup­port, but they’re usu­al­ly bet­ter than most, as they haven’t out­sourced that to India. Reluc­tant­ly, I final­ly called.

If you ever call 1&1 and “Grace” answers, just hang up and try again. Bet­ter yet, keep her tied up on the phone and try from anoth­er line, just to be sure you’ll get some­one else. She sim­ply can’t under­stand Eng­lish well enough to func­tion in any job that requires tele­phone inter­ac­tion, and her tech­ni­cal skills seem to be abysmal (it was hard to tell, con­sid­er­ing the lan­guage issue). I was on the phone for more than 90 min­utes, and could­n’t get any­where. I kept ask­ing to speak to her super­vi­sor, and she kept being obstruc­tion­ist.

She asked me to spell the name of the affect­ed domain (technomom.com) over and over and over again. I did so, very slow­ly and clear­ly, at least five times. What did she do? Inform me that gbncom.com was work­ing just fine, and ask me what error mes­sage I was get­ting!

Oth­er than the fact that the end in .com, do you find any sim­i­lar­i­ty in those names?

I final­ly got her to this site, where the errors were clear­ly vis­i­ble to every vis­i­tor. Then, final­ly, she start­ed talk­ing about esca­lat­ing the prob­lem to some­one else. She was­n’t sure who, though, and claimed that nobody there can make out­bound calls, so she could­n’t have that per­son (or her super­vi­sor) call me back. More hold­ing. Thanks God­dess for unlim­it­ed cell min­utes! I real­ly, real­ly need to get a head­set, though, as I was in more and more pain from sim­ply hold­ing the tele­phone.

At near­ly 5, “Glen” final­ly got on the phone. He said he has no input regard­ing the hir­ing of “advi­sors” like “Grace.” If the sup­posed super­vi­sor does­n’t, who does? In any case, he final­ly pin­point­ed the prob­lem: the data­base was full. To be accu­rate, it was more than full, 47mb over the size lim­it!

Hon­est­ly, I had­n’t checked that. But how could that hap­pen? And would­n’t I get some kind of notice or warn­ing? Well, no, they don’t have any­thing in place to warn users when data­bas­es are get­ting too big. That seems like a ridicu­lous­ly easy thing to put in place, but appar­ent­ly it isn’t impor­tant to them.

I was aware of the 100mb lim­it 1&1 places on MySQL data­bas­es on our plan, but every time I’d looked at the usage, every data­base had 97mb free, or more! Blogs are most­ly text! The images I do post aren’t even stored in MySQL!

After get­ting off the phone, I looked at the size of all each table. The cul­prit was the cache for the Joe Tan/Silas Part­ners Flickr pho­to album plu­g­in. I did­n’t notice, when I installed an upgrade to the plu­g­in, that it defaults to show­ing all of the Flickr groups you’re in. There’s no way that I can see to dis­able caching, either, and it seems that some­body browsed a lot of group pho­tos at some point over the week­end. Clear­ing that cache took me back to being way, way below the data­base size lim­it. If you use that plu­g­in (which is great, BTW), check the set­tings!

So that’s why you’re see­ing my blog posts appear late. It’s bet­ter than “the dog ate my blog posts,” at least. Isn’t it?