**UPDATE: The issue was with WP Super Cache and the VPS is using APC for caching**
I just recently updated WordPress to 3.3, I updated my Plugins then Themes and after applying all the updates everything looked like it was going smooth no errors but when I accessed my website from my desktop computer I was left with nothing but a blank white screen, what kind of magic was at hand here? Did the WordPress 3.3 update blank screen me? I had no clue but I looked at my logs for nginx and the HTTP status I was getting was 500 which is “Internal Error – The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.” I know nothing was changed in those few minutes when it went down and I know the other System Administrator would have told me if he was going to do something so I back tracked to when the problem happened.
My first guess would be the plugins, if this was a theme problem my site would display text so I opened a SSH connection to the server and located the plugin directory located at /wp-content/, I moved the plugins directory to pluginsold and created a new folder called plugins and made sure the permissions where correct. After I made the new plugins directory I was able to access my site, at this point I would try reinstalling your plugins again because I haven’t found a simply way to do it but from what I can tell out of my list is that one of these plugins caused it:
- Akismet
- BWP-Recaptcha
- Nextgen-Gallery
- WordPress SEO
- WP Super Cache
- WPTouch
I enabled Akismet and BWP-Recaptcha both seem to be working fine as of right now but I will update if I figure out which one is causing the issue.
Don’t think it was WP Super Cache as I updated to WP 3.3 and had no problems.
It was WP Super Cache, we run a LEMP (Linux Enginx MySQL and PHP) and we have APC (A PHP Accelerator) I believe WP Super Cache was caching something APC already cached causing HTTP 500 errors, I had to use another plugin to see if that was the problem and the site worked fine since.