Mediavine choking sites…

in Uncategorized

The Mediavine control panel has been crushing sites running it.

We’re happy to say that it didn’t bring any of our hosted sites down, or slow servers down significantly. 🙂 But it did create a major mess for us, and sites running it.

Version 1.4.x has a terrible bug that continually adds cron (scheduled) jobs to a site’s list of things to run. Ultimately, it chokes the site’s and servers database, plus causes the server to run the daily & weekly jobs multiple times a second.

They sent out an emergency alert to their clients about it. The alert says to deactivate the plugin, delete it, reinstall the newest version  (1.5.1), and then activate it.

We’ve followed the process for our clients, and have at least installed (but not activated) version 1.5.1.

Since the plugin added so many lines to the cron part of a site’s database, not all plugin re-activations have been successful. If your site is one of them, please let us know, and we can try to manually clean out the database to see if that fixes it.

-TS

P.S. Send chocolate.

Kate Lloyd July 20, 2017

Thank you for all this. I don’t think my website was effected (?), but you guys are amazing how onto this you are. Great work.

Amber Bracegirdle July 25, 2017

Jay, thanks for being awesome throughout this. We know we made a huge mistake, and we’re doing everything we can to make it right. Your team’s attention to detail here meant that our shared customers didn’t suffer adverse affects to our mistake, and that means everything to us. So thank you. And the chocolate is on its way – I ordered some brownie/cookie thing to come with the pizzas!

– Amber, co-founder at Mediavine

admin July 25, 2017

Thank you Amber!

Mistakes happen. It’s how we handle them which shows whether or not we deserve our clients’ trust. Once we connected, and I had visibility into your mindset & processes, I’ve been very impressed with how Mediavine has handled the situation. (There will be a full TS blog post about it later.)

The summary of the post is that is it wonderful to see another company which owns their mistakes, and goes at it with the mindset of “let’s get this fixed & figure out how this will never happen again.”

-Jay

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