I run my own server and have a few dozen WordPress sites. Recently, many updates (plugin and core) have been silently failing. If I try to do the update from the updates page, I get a message like this one:
The update process is starting. This process may take a while on some
hosts, so please be patient.Enabling Maintenance modeâ¦
Updating Plugin Jetpack by WordPress.com (1/1)
But it never progresses further. If I attempt the update from the plugins page, I get
Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/jetpack.2.3.1.zipâ¦
Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/jetpack.2.3.1.zipâ¦
But nothing more. There is nothing in either the PHP nor apache error logs, even if I set WP_DEBUG to true.
To be clear, this is happening for several plugins on all sites on this server, so I presume there’s a configuration issue or other problem. But I don’t know where to start looking to fix and/or debug the problem. Can anyone advise?
PS – The server is running WHM/CPanel, so it’s CENTOS 5.8. Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3 (the problem also occurred in 5.2). The problem began when the managed support made some changes that were designed to stop the server overloading.
There is a bug in some versions of PHP itself, unzip hangs.
PHP 5.2.17 hangs,
PHP 5.3.24 works as expected.
PHP Change Log http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.3.4 says
PHP Version 5.3.4 released 09-Dec-2010 – “Fixed crash in zip extract method (possible CWE-170)”. (Note: 5.3.24 released 11-April-2013, and is no longer the latest version.)
http://lcblog.lernerconsult.com/2013-php-unzip-bug-makes-wordpress-updates-hang/ has the PHP program I used to demonstrate the bug is PHP not WordPress or plugins.