wordpress plugin operations hang sometimes

[kkkwj]

I am running the most recent xampp 5.6.12/wordpress 4.6.1 setup on my mac OSX (currently upgraded to Sierra). Generally speaking the whole setup works fine.

But sometimes (often enough to be frustrating), operations to do with adding new plugins, or upgrading plugins, seem to hang. When they work, the operations are very fast, like normal ops. But sometimes the plugin operations (upgrades or add new) just hang wpress in .maintenance mode.

It feels like a name lookup timeout problem. Once I saw a cURL 6: error, which was a name lookup. I've been fighting the problem for a month, without success, even after reading 100+ posts on the net (none of them were exactly on my problem).

When the problem occurs, xampp (or wordpress) hangs, after putting the wp site in .maintenance mode. Usually I have to manually remove the .maintenance file to get things going again (with the plugin operation still not finished).

Othertimes, the plugin operations are lightning fast, as expected.


To date, I have:
- disabled ipV6 in /etc/hosts (commented out the ::1 line)
- ensured that '127.0.0.1 mac.local' is in /etc/hosts

I'm at the end of my rope. Everything on the mac (including sometimes the plugin/upgrade/addnew operations) works fine for the most part. But the hanging plugin ops (sometimes login ops too) are driving me nuts.

Does anyone have any better ideas to try? Any ideas on how I can nail down the exact problem? And then KILL it?

Thanks, Kevin

(1) Extra info: I am not sure this is related, because things work normally. But I include it here, just in case. I don't know how to fix this error, since I just clicked the buttons and a default install of xampp. I made no changes to any of the default installation parameters, as far as I can remember.

logs/error_log:[Sun Oct 16 13:13:50.956969 2016] [core:error] [pid 56868] [client 127.0.0.1:58150] AH00124: Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace., referer: http: //mac.local/wordpress/wp-admin/plugin-install.php

(2) Extra info: One of the net postings said that he changed 'mac.local' to 'mac.xxx' because on a mac, the .local top level domain is used for the Bonjour service. But I don't even know how to change the .local domain either. (And why would it work half the time anyway, even with .local?)

[Nobbie]

You should ask in a WordPress Forum (here is only a Xampp Forum), as it seems to be a pure WordPress issue. We have no WordPress Support on this forum.

Anyway, a small idea when reading your lines: i think, that WordPress kind of "contacts" the WordPress server (i.e. wordpress.com or similar) in order to do some administration / synchronisation or similar. Therefore the cURL Package is used and it might happen, that simply this connection hangs (due to traffic or whatever), which slows down the installation / administration of plugins. Only a clue.

And a final note (you wont like it....): i worked with WordPress a couple of years, but since a few month, we had the very bad problem, that our Online Server had been hacked (meanwhile three times in 6 month). I started to investigate what could be the reason and i found out, that WordPress itself has been hijacked. I also found out, where and how it happened: we had some plugins installed in our WordPress installation and these plugins were heavily poisoned by a trojan(!!!). I went deeper into the investigation and finally found a long blog about "security and WordPress plugins", which shows up how badly maintained WordPress plugins are (simply everybody may deliver new plugins) and even if they are provided including source code, hackers simply use plugins to hack WordPress installations. I found out, that is so badly unsafe to install and run WordPress with plugins (and there is no way how to overcome these general problems), that i decided to de-install WordPress and rebuild my own Homepage with good old HTML and self written PHP scripts. Unfortunately i do not remember the link to this blog, but you will find lots of informations if you enter "security Wordpress plugins" or "trojan virus wordpress plugins" into Google and i promise, you will get very very unsure, if you really should go on with WordPress. It is the worst and unsafest environment i ever had on my server. I am pretty sure that probably millions of WordPress installations may have been hacked, the owner simply does not know it....