How to debug wordpress admin user search in MAMP

0
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I'm developing my Wordpress site locally on OSX 10.8 using MAMP Pro v2.2.1. Everything works normally EXCEPT for when I'm logged in as an admin user and I go to Settings > All Users and then try to search for a specific user (using the search bar at the top). Whenever I do this, the form seems to submit, the little spinner on the browser starts turning... and then nothing happens. No errors in the console. No 500 page. Just spinning wheel forever. And after that I can't open any of the other menus unless I stop/start MAMP. I have a lot of experience debugging wordpress plugins and themes, but I have no idea how to debug admin stuff since it's provided by the core.

What I've tried so far:

  • All other menu pages respond normally (unless I cause this crash).
  • All other admin menus respond normally, including search functionality.
  • The live site works fine on the server, including user search
  • My colleague does not have this problem when checking out the same code and testing on his PC with XAMP.
  • I ran CHECK TABLE wp_users and MySQL returned "Ok"
  • I checked MAMP's php_error.log, mysql_error_log.err

Another detail is that after I trigger the problem (by searching users), I can close the window, browse to other websites, and when I return to my local site it's STILL broken. The only way to resolve it is to restart MAMP

I would love any suggestions for how to debug this problem because I'm in the middle of a project that involves user registration and the inability to search users is really inconvenient.

2
phpmysqlwordpressosx-mountain-lionmamp
Did you check the PHP error logs? - prodigitalson
@prodigitalson Thanks for the reminder. I did check MAMP's logs and I don't see anything. - emersonthis
Try to debug and troubleshoot, maybe something comes up. - brasofilo

2 Answers

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Have you set up a local database to use, or is your MAMP copy of the site connecting to the live database? Remote database connections are often slow and may time out if you're opening and closing connections quite often (or not closing them all).

0
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I was able to solve this by deleting a bunch of users from the wp_users table. I suspected that I was only having this problem in the users table because that was by far the largest table (it had recently been dumped from the production site with around 9000 users). I guess MAMP's MySQL was crashing because it couldn't handle the search query on such a large table. As soon as I removed most of the rows the search started working normally again. I'm sure there's another solution for someone more familiar with MySQL configuration in MAMP.