Gibberish Text When Rebuilding Blog(s), Gibberish text often appears in the "Rebuild Site" window. Options

[astrocortex]

Hello, I'm working with a Movable Type Enterprise (1.5.1) installation that has functioned properly for about three years and only recently began to experience the following issue:

When a large blog (over 2,000 entries) is rebuilt in its entirety, oftentimes the rebuilding halts and the contents of the "Rebuild Site" pop-up window gets replaced with gibberish text - sort of like what happens when you try to view the contents of a binary executable program in a text editor. Has anyone experienced this issue before? If so, what was the cause and how did your resolve it? Alternately, does anyone have any pointers on where to look for the cause of the problem?

I did some preliminary investigation and came up with a few things:
1) Try lowering the "EntriesPerRebuild" directive in the mt-config.cgi file. If the gibberish-text issue appears because the server or DB is overloaded, I wonder if lowering the value may help.
2) Perhaps there is a log file that Movable Type Enterprise writes information to that would hold clues. Does anyone know where I would look for this file?
3) Perhaps the gibberish text is an error message that is being read from a file that got corrupted when the initial installation of Movable Type Enterprise took place. Perhaps the file containing said error message was incorrectly uploaded as BINARY instead of ASCII.

I did a forum search and found a similar issue (http://forums.sixapart.com/index.php?showtopic=17298), but that user's problem occurred when Movable Type was newly installed. In contrast, the installation of Movable Type I work with has, as far as I can tell, been functioning properly - and still functions fine in most cases - for the past 3 years. The issue I've described only occurs when rebuilding large blogs.

Can anyone think of anything else I should look into?

Thanks, I appreciate the help.

This post has been edited by astrocortex: Jan 9 2009, 12:37 PM

[OtherNiceMan]

Do you still have a support contract with your enterprise system?

It could be something as simple as the content of a jpg or gif being written out as text rather than being displayed.

Can you scroll down to see the buttons?

Does the site still rebuild.

[astrocortex]

Do you still have a support contract with your enterprise system?

Yes, this is avenue is being persued, but I thought it couldn't hurt to ask for help in this public forum.

It could be something as simple as the content of a jpg or gif being written out as text rather than being displayed.

Hm, so you are saying that an image inside a blog post may get written out as text in the "Rebuild Site" popup menu? Have you experienced that before? How did you resolve it?

Can you scroll down to see the buttons?

No, the buttons in the "Rebuild Site" popup menu disappear and all that appears is gibberish binary-looking text.

Does the site still rebuild.

The blog gets rebuilt up until the point of the gibberish text occurring. So in other words, the blog gets partially rebuilt.

[OtherNiceMan]

Not necessarily a image in the blog post, but maybe a system asset or graphic on the rebuild page (maybe the status bar grpahic). You can try re-uploading the graphics from mt-static making sure they are uploaded as binary files.

This post has been edited by OtherNiceMan: Jan 21 2009, 08:57 AM

[astrocortex]

Not necessarily a image in the blog post, but maybe a system asset or graphic on the rebuild page (maybe the status bar grpahic). You can try re-uploading the graphics from mt-static making sure they are uploaded as binary files.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I will look into that.

It seems like lowering the EntriesPerRebuild mt-config directive did the trick, though that's not definite yet.