We run Vanilla and have have seen a good amount of traffic recently. And all of a sudden we have been experiencing weird system crashing bugs. One of which seems to be the conf/settings.php getting wiped, causing the system to go down altogether. Statistics plugin options.inc file getting wiped causing that to break, and some inconsistencies in the JQMedia plug-in. We have also been dealing with a bit of trouble with our hosting, mediatemple.net which is usually pretty reliable. Does vanilla have trouble with higher volumes of posting? Could this be a hosting issue. I'm getting a bit worried because we are just starting out and I don't want our user base to get frustrated. Our current numbers are:
Discussions: 650 Comments: 13965 Users: 279 Posts per 24 hours: 400-500 sometimes in the 700's
There is no locking feature preventing settings.php to be wiped out If 2 instance of php try to write it at the same time. That happens when an extension try to update the file an each load.
Vanilla 1.1.3+ still doesn't lock settings.php but won't update it if it's unnecessary.
so one of the extensions he has installed is writing to the settings.php without checking if the parameter already exist. thats not how it should be done.
I don't know, it seems as though it happens when my hosting provider says its having 'LATENCY' issues. Maybe the lag in server response is heightening the probability of this happening? Now that I think about it that seems likely but I'll leave official judgment to the experts.
Yes, lag will definitely make this more likely to happen. Updating to 1.1.3 should resolve the issue in 90% of the cases.
A quick fix if you need to postpone upgrading would be to make sure that your library/framework/Framework.Functions.php file's AddConfigurationSetting function (right at the top) looks like the one in this post: JQThickBox # 58