Comments on: Sudden empty / blank page for large posts with WordPress

By: Christopher Sutton

Christopher Sutton — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:49:59 +0000

Just wasted 20 minutes trying to figure out this bizarre problem with a post – but then your solution (changing the PCRE limits in php.ini) worked like a charm. Thanks for bothering to write it up!

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:33:59 +0000

Thank you!! Just wasted 3 hours of my life trying to figure this out.

I’m on a shared server with BlueHost, but the php.ini fix worked perfectly even without any sort of server reset (sadly, that’s the last thing I tried…)

Thanks again for putting this together!

By: pffmihai

pffmihai — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:55:17 +0000

I was too working on a client page with lots of shortcodes so he can easily edit the page contents and i was in the same position.

Using these two lines

ini_set(‘pcre.recursion_limit’,20000000);
ini_set(‘pcre.backtrack_limit’,10000000);

in the wp-config.php worked like a charm.

Another note on the code, beside the fact that it doesn’t require the apache restart, is that you have to make sure you change the quote marks in that as wordpress comment system replaces the quotes in a funny way.

Thank you for the solution.

By: Floridan

Floridan — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:01:32 +0000

Hi Abel,
I posted this over at Wordpress.org and I would like to re-post it here for those readers who had no success with your fix.

Some of you have reported issues with blank pages if your posts are too long or contain too many comments. I had the same problem with disappearing posts until Rob in tech support at Liquid Web helped me to resolve the issue. I tried Abel’s fix over at http://www.undermyhat.org/blog/2009/07/sudden-empty-blank-page-for-large-posts-with-wordpress/ but I had no success.

Then Rob came up with the solution after about 45 minutes of troubleshooting. The fix is to increase the memory limit in your wp_settings.php file which is found in your server root. The number below worked for me! I’m a happy camper now.

if ( !defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') ) define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '48M');

By: YouLin

YouLin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:25:00 +0000

Hi, Abel, Found your useful blog via search. I am having this problem since months. And this week I installed WP ver3.0, and it is getting worst and mess up my whole blog. I just realised that a bug on wordpress ver 3. I am wondering wheather your solutions(since it's quite long from now)can apply to the current problem?

By: Rob Quinn

Rob Quinn — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:04:49 +0000

Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! I a freakin’ geek and have be tearing what little hair I have left trying to figure out why changing some minor text on my wife’s doll site was causing the page to go blank. I owe you a beer.

By: Anne

Anne — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 03:09:29 +0000

THANKS A MILLION!! We were really banging our heads against the wall until we read your post. You are a saint! Your fix worked great!

By: fum

fum — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:31:43 +0000

I want to add a detail that I forgot:
support people asked me to show you an example of the problem input, so I made a large entry to show the issue.
Then when I only have included a very large text the problem not appears, the entry was normal published.
How is it I thought?
When I added an singlepic with nextgen gallery shortcode, I got the trouble, the full entry disappears.

By: fum

fum — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:50:24 +0000

Hi,first thank you for publish your work, I got exactly the sensation you said when I sow that my laborious entry does not appear in my blog.
I tried to solve the trouble contacting the support hosting people and they said that has modified the recursion limit of PHP.ini according to your instructions. But nothing change.
Any suggestion about this?

In other way, I tried the alternative solution and I have looked the formating.php and sought the code line you said, but can’t find it. There are about twenty similar lines but not exactly this. I’m using WP 2.9.2 and your example is over 2.8 can you tell me how to find the equivalent?

I’m very gratefull if you can help me, greetings, and sorry for my horrible english.

By: Abel Braaksma

Abel Braaksma — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 10:18:58 +0000

Apologies for missing your comment earlier on. I’m running WordPress 2.9.x and the fix still works (the fix is at PHP level, not really at WP level, so it should work for any future version). Can you elaborate what your issue is if it doesn’t help?