Failing updates, but not really

A couple months ago I posted saying 1 site in 32 wouldn’t take updates from MainWP. It was thought that it was a PHP timeout, or memory problem. I monkeyed with those values and it didn’t help. In fact, I’m up to about 6 sites now that won’t take updates. Or, at least when I hit the “Update all xxxx” button, I get red x’s by 6 or so of the 35 sites in MainWP. The odd thing is, though, that if I sync my sites immediately after, the updates appear to have taken. I have verified by logging into a site’s Dashboard and watching. Even though MainWP says no joy, the updates happen just like they should.

Pretty much every site I add now has this problem. I have disabled the plugin and enabled the plugin, I have changed the security key, I have dropped the number of requests and all that in MainWP’s settings to not more than double the default values (I used to have many of them sky high to speed things up)… Nothing seems to make a difference.

Not sure what else to try. All my plugins are up to date as far as MainWP and MainWP Child. All the sites are hosted on the same server. All the sites are running PHP 7.4.x.

Any thoughts?

HI Fotan,

When running updates, it is possible that request from your dashboard gets blocked or terminated on the child site side so the Dashboard doesn’t get positive feedback about finished updates and it shows red x.

Are these sites that show this problem all on the same server or across different servers/hosts?
Is there something else in common, like some security or caching plugin?

I don’t think so. All the sites are on the same server with the same settings in Wordfence. No additional security plugins.

What about server-side firewall?

Have you noticed that this happens with any/all plugins or just specific plugins?

I’m assuming it’s not a server-side thing because there are about 30 sites on the same server that don’t have the problem.

Every plugin and theme that I have tried to update so far.

Hi @fotan,

Thanks for verifying that.

Can you please post the community system report from your MainWP Dashboard for review? The report is located in your Dashboard under Status → Server, on the top right of the page.

Be sure to use the button like the one below; this button hides all your private information:

image

Pressing the button auto-copies the report to your clipboard then just paste it in a reply here.

The memory limit is actually set to 1024 in cPanel


### Server Info                    Required                                               Detected                                     Status   ###

MainWP Dashboard                   
MainWP Dashboard Version           4.1.6                                                  4.1.6                                        Pass        
MainWP Upload Directory            Writable                                               Writable                                     Pass        
MainWP Extensions                  
MainWP Branding Extension          4.0.2.1                                                API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Bulk Settings Manager Extension4.0.2.1                                                API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Clean and Lock Extension    4.0.1.1                                                API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Clone Extension             4.0.1                                                  API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Code Snippets Extension     4.0.1                                                  API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Comments Extension          4.0.2.1                                                API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Custom Dashboard Extension  4.0.2                                                  API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Favorites Extension         4.0.5                                                  API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP File Uploader Extension     4.0.1                                                  API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Maintenance Extension       4.0.2.1                                                API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Team Control                4.0.1.1                                                API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP UpdraftPlus Extension       4.0.4                                                  API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP URL Extractor Extension     4.0.1.1                                                API License Inactive                         Warning     
MainWP WooCommerce Status Extension4.0.4                                                  API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP Wordfence Extension         4.0.3                                                  API License Active                           Pass        
MainWP WordPress SEO Extension     4.0.1                                                  API License Inactive                         Warning     
WordPress                          
WordPress Version                  >=3.6                                                  5.7.1                                        Pass        
WordPress Memory Limit             >=64M                                                  256M                                         Pass        
MultiSite Disabled                 =true                                                  true                                         Pass        
FileSystem Method                  = direct                                               direct                                       Pass        
PHP                                
PHP Version                        >=5.6                                                  7.4.18                                       Pass        
PHP Safe Mode Disabled             =true                                                  true                                         Pass        
PHP Max Execution Time             >=30 seconds                                           600                                          Pass        
PHP Max Input Time                 >=30 seconds                                           600                                          Pass        
PHP Memory Limit                   >=128M                                                 1024M                                        Pass        
PCRE Backtracking Limit            >=10000                                                1000000                                      Pass        
PHP Upload Max Filesize            >=2M                                                   1024M                                        Pass        
PHP Post Max Size                  >=2M                                                   1024M                                        Pass        
SSL Extension Enabled              =true                                                  true                                         Pass        
SSL Warnings                       = empty                                                                                             Pass        
cURL Extension Enabled             =true                                                  true                                         Pass        
cURL Timeout                       >=300 seconds                                          60                                           Warning     
cURL Version                       >=7.18.1                                               7.76.1                                       Pass        
cURL SSL Version                   >=OpenSSL/0.9.8l                                       OpenSSL/1.1.1k                               Pass        
PHP Allow URL fopen                NO                                                     
PHP Exif Support                   YES ( V7.4.)                                           
PHP IPTC Support                   YES                                                    
PHP XML Support                    YES                                                    
PHP Disabled Functions             No functions disabled.                                 
PHP Loaded Extensions              Core, PDO, Phar, Reflection, SPL, SimpleXML, Zend OPcache, bcmath, cgi-fcgi, ctype, curl, date, dom, exif, fileinfo, filter, ftp, gd, gettext, gmp, hash, iconv, imap, intl, json, ldap, libxml, mbstring, mysqli, mysqlnd, openssl, pcntl, pcre, pdo_mysql, pdo_sqlite, posix, readline, session, sqlite3, standard, tokenizer, xml, xmlreader, xmlwriter, xsl, zip, zlib
MySQL                              
MySQL Version                      >=5.0                                                  10.3.28-MariaDB                              Pass        
MySQL Mode                         ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION
MySQL Client Encoding              utf8mb4                                                
Server Info                        
Server Software                    Apache                                                 
Operating System                   Linux                                                  
Architecture                       64		 bit                                               
Server Protocol                    HTTP/1.1                                               
HTTPS                              ON                                                     
Server self connect                Response Test O.K.                                     
User Agent                         Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.90 Safari/537.36 Edg/89.0.774.54
Gateway Interface                  CGI/1.1                                                
Memory Usage                       16.13 MB                                               
Request Time                       1620309831                                             
Accept Content                     text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Charset Content             N/A                                                    
MainWP Settings                    
Number Of Child Sites              40                                                     
Use WP-Cron                        Yes                                                    
Optimize for Shared Hosting or Big NetworksYes                                                    
Automatic Daily Update             Install trusted updates                                
Abandoned Plugins/Themes Tolerance 365                                                    
Maximum number of posts to return                                                         
Maximum number of pages to return                                                         
Maximum Number of Comments         50                                                     
Primary Backup System              MainWP UpdraftPlus Extension                           
Maximum simultaneous requests      8                                                      
Minimum delay between requests     200                                                    
Maximum simultaneous requests per ip5                                                      
Minimum delay between requests to the same ip1000                                                   
Maximum simultaneous sync requests 16                                                     
Minimum simultaneous install/update requests5                                                      
Active Plugins                     
Activity Log for MainWP            1.7.0                                                  Inactive                                     
Admin Notices Manager              1.1.0                                                  Active                                       
Health Check & Troubleshooting     1.4.5                                                  Inactive                                     
MainWP Child                       4.1.6.1                                                Active                                       
MainWP Dashboard                   4.1.6                                                  Active                                       
MainWP Key Maker                   1.2                                                    Active                                       
Matomo Analytics - Ethical Stats. Powerful Insights.4.2.0                                                  Inactive                                     
Really Simple SSL                  4.0.14                                                 Active                                       
UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore       2.16.56.25                                             Active                                       
Wordfence Security                 7.5.2                                                  Active                                       
WP Rollback                        1.7.1                                                  Active                                       
Yoast SEO                          16.2                                                   Active                                       

We’ve had this same issue for ages. Did contact support about it but didn’t really get anywhere from memory. It seems to be better than it was with the last couple of updates but still fails from time to time.

Hi @fotan,

I see that you have custom values set in the MainWP > Settings > Advanced Options.
The issue that you experience could easily be caused when there is too many requests and server can’t process them.

Can you try to restore default values in the Advanced settings and see how it goes over the next couple of days?

Hi @oliver.nash,

Issues like this can be caused by many different reasons. If you still can duplicate it, please let us know and we will help with troubleshooting. For the start, can also post the community system report from your MainWP Dashboard for review? The report is located in your Dashboard under Status → Server, on the top right of the page.

Be sure to use the button like the one below; this button hides all your private information:

image

Pressing the button auto-copies the report to your clipboard then just paste it in a reply here.

I’ll give it a shot, but the values you’re seeing are actually already dialed back from what they used to be and I never used to have this problem. I guess we have had a major version release though, so maybe everything is just a little different.

I just put everything back to default and the same sites are failing on a plugin update.

2 Likes

Yes, we have this and randomly ‘disconnected’ sites since the start and never got to a solution with MainWP support.
It is a pain one learns to live with.

We often see that clicking ‘update all’ works better than going into the update pages and doing it from there (go figure). Also, any disconnected site (update page: HTTP Response Check Results) showing in red may not seem up when using the recheck (and you have to do 1 by 1 anyway) but going to each sites own page and doing a reconnect there almost always works … for a bit.

We’ve never been able to figure out what creates the ‘randomness’ of this but it does seem MainWP based (as sites may connect and update perfectly 1 day, not the next and perfect again the next. Our servers luckily don’t change that much that often :wink:

Let me know as well if you ever find a real solution :slight_smile:

Hi @fotan,

If you are still experiencing the reported issue, please feel free to reach out via support ticket so we can check this further.

Hi @SuppY,

Can you also open a helpdesk ticket so we can collect additional info and check what is going on?

Dear Bogdan,
As mentioned, we already tried that and it went nowhere so we learned to live with the inconvenience for now.
Thanks anyway but no thanks

Hi @SuppY, I really hope that the issue on your setup will resolve with the future update. If you change your mind, feel free to reach out, I will be happy to check this again.

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