Troubleshooting – Quick Intro

Most problems that can occur in Symbiostock plugins and themes are related to server environment setup. A few also are related to Symbiostock itself — a few unaddressed bugs or simple limitations. We are building a list so you can address these issues quickly and easily.

Things addressed in this intro:

1 – Image Processing

• 1.1 Preliminary Checks[/url]
• 1.2 Image Page Created, but No Previews Generated
• 1.3 Process Crash, White Screen, or Error
• 1.4 Image Not Found (But its really there!)
• 1.5 Bulk image process dies

2 – Server Settings

• 2.1 php.ini
• 2.2 Memory
• 2.3 Script Time Limit

[size=200IMAGE PROCESSING [/size]

The image processing system is fairly in-depth. It must provide resizing, watermarking, and image meta-data functions. Generally these work reliably. The image processing system requires as much memory as you can allow it to have.

Preliminary Checks

1. Check your php.ini’s memory limit. Its often default at 128 megabytes. If you can set it higher, then do so! If it is lower, set it to 128 or 256 depending on your server’s limits.
2. Ensure that your watermark image has been properly linked. Go to BEE->SETTINGS and check which link is assigned for the watermark. Paste it into your browser’s address bar, and ensure that it leads to an image. If it leads to a 404, that may crash the watermark creation process.

Image Page Created, but No Previews Generated

This is almost always related to memory. If the image is too big, the image processing will abort, but still create an image page. Either up your memory settings, or verify that the image in question is not too large for your server to handle.

Process Crash, White Screen, or Error

• Often caused by a missing watermark file. If the watermark is not found, or the retrieved file is invalid, then the process crashes with or without a warning (depending on configuration).
• Can also be caused by a memory deficiency due to server environment, or that the image is just too darn big. 😀

Image Not Found (But its really there!)

This is due to a present limitation in the image processor. It does not handle apostrophes ” ‘ ” or extra periods ” . ” in file names at this time. The ideal image naming convention is an alphanumeric (only numbers and letters) with (optionally) underscores or hyphens to separate words.

Working filename examples:

1. myImage.jpg
2. MyImage.png
3. my_image.png
4. my-image.jpg

Filenames that presently generate errors:

1. myImage.something.jpg (the extra period trips up the processor when its determining a file type)
2. Dog’s_collar.png (the apostrophe is bad, bad, bad)

Note – if you wish to have an accompanying .zip or .eps file, they must have an identical name to its accompanying image preview, or it will generate a “mismatch” error.

Bulk image process dies

If you are processing a large amount of images and you find that the process dies, fizzles, or hangs after a while, its most likely due to script time limit, which most hosting limits to 30 seconds.

Server Settings

php.ini

Usually its sufficient to edit your php.ini file thus increasing your allowed memory use, upload limits, and enabling imagick, the imagemagick extension, which Symbiostock uses.

First, its necessary to have a php.ini file. Often it should be in your html root by default, but in other cases it must be generated.

To generate a php.ini go to:

1. cpanel
2. php config
3. Choose php4 or php5 with php.ini.
4. — Notice php.ini now in your html directory.

Edit php.ini, alter or add these values:
[

memory_limit=128M

upload_max_filesize=50M

post_max_size=50M

upload_max_filesize=200M

extension=imagick.so

max_execution_time=300

NOTE – max_execution_time will probably not be allowed to run more than 30 seconds no matter what you do. Shared hosting keeps this value low for safety and memory reasons. On dedicated or advanced hosting packages, however, you can set the number to whatever you wish.

Memory

Usually default hosting values for Symbiostock are minimally sufficient and in many cases too low. Here is what you can do to allow more memory to the image processing / file manipulation in Symbiostock.

• Edit your php.ini file with Symbiostock basic values (shown above).
• It *may* be necessary to change your wordpress memory limit. Simply open your wp_config.php file (top level of site) and add/change the following value:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Script Time Limit

Script time limits effect the following Symbiostock functions:

1. Image processing – amount of images that can be processed in one run.
2. Site updates – sitemaps, network related file generating, batch processing.

In many cases, scripts are set to die after 30 seconds due to shared hosting limitations. If you are on an advanced package, you can set script time limits higher by editing your php.ini (see php.ini above).