I figured i’d log what was going on with my blog should someone else hit the problem… The basic problem was a few weeks or a month ago I started getting failures when using ecto to post to my blog. The failures showed up in an ecto error dialog as this:

Parsing Failure!

Could not parse response for “metaWeblog.editPost”. Please check the console log for more information.

Upon inspecting the log I saw this in the console:

500 Internal Server Error

Internal Server Error



The server encountered an internal error or

misconfiguration and was unable to complete

your request.

Please contact the server administrator,

xxx@swimfinssf.com and inform them of the time the error occurred,

and anything you might have done that may have

caused the error.

This stimyed me as the message basically told me nothing about what actually failed… I found a few posts indicating that it might be a file permissions problem on the server so I fixed permissions on every file I could find but that did nothing… I searched and searched and searched and finally thought to look in the server log itself… Server log contained this error

Out of memory!

Callback called exit at mt.cgi line 11.

BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at mt.cgi line 11.

[Fri Jan 6 08:04:04 2006] [error] [client 71.139.13.81] Premature end of script headers: /home/swimfins/swimfinssf.com/mt/mt.cgi

Looking at mt.cgi didn’t tell me anything – that line in the source is the ‘run the blog’ line (i.e. all of MT was run in that line so it didn’t help at all… So then I started googling again. This time I came upon a lone sparse article which indicated that this was caused by the server process running out of memory when trying to access the Berkeley DB databases I was using to store entries. The article indicated that I should switch to MySQL which I did.. and BINGO.. worked like a charm and increased the speed of MT at the same time…

Anyway.. not super interesting but I wanted to post it should some one else start googling after seeing the same errors. Hope it helps someone.

Happy hacking

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