Strange sitemap issue?

Question

Hi, been having a headache of an issue lately. My site is hosted by Digital Ocean and runs on the forum software Invision Power Suite. We’re on PHP version 7.4.26 and MySQL version 8.0.27. The forum has several background maintenance tasks that run at intervals. One of them, the sitemapgenerator, submits our forum’s latest content to search engines, Google and Bing. However, recently it has been failing to properly run at random times (there is no consistency to it so I can’t really describe a pattern) and then other times it runs fine without issue. Sometimes when it fails, it possibly causes a server slowdown and CPU spike that makes our site have an nginx loading error for about 5 minutes. At least I assume it failing is the cause. We disabled all third party plugins, and none of them are the source of the issue. We were told by IPS that this is an issue with the server in writing a sitemap and/or submitting to the search engines, so we’re turning here for any advice. Any ideas what could be the cause of this or where to look in our files? Maybe there’s something really obscure we’re missing; we’re not professional developers so it’s been hard to figure out. Any direction to point us in of where to search would be every much appreciated.

We also don’t mean to annoy the Digital Ocean team if this is out of your hands, but IPS keeps insisting this is a server issue and not anything to do with their software, so we’re caught in a bind on who to ask. There are no other issues with our server otherwise so this isn’t a major problem, just an occasional annoyance I’d like to figure out the source of.

KFSys · Answer

Hi @gloveworld49 , So, there could be a lot of reasons as to why this is happening. It can be due to memory shortage, some error in your website’s code, high load on your Droplet and so on. Let’s try to troubleshoot this, first when you notice the issue of your website is down, check your Error Logs, SSH to your droplet and see what does the log says. You should be able to find it at /var/log/nginx/error.log or /var/log/nginx/error_log. In there you can see the exact error as to why your website is down. It’s possible as said that you have high load and there is not enough memory on the droplet. You can also see if Nginx and MySQL are actually running: systemctl status nginx systemctl status mysql If they are down, it’s most possibly due to memory shortage or high load. In that case, you can try adding SWAP to your machine or just upgrading. If your error log suggests otherwise, it would be wise to try and search for that error in either some search engines or post it here and we’ll try to assist. Lastly, it’s possible there is some bug with the Application. It’s good practice to check the developer of the platform you are using, in your case Invision Power Suite and see if any other users report the same behavior. Hope this helps!

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Strange sitemap issue?

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