QUOTE
Couldn't create FileInfo because Failed to generate unique ID: Tie '/home/ca/[mydomainname.com]/mt-database/ids.db' failed: Cannot allocate memory
I could still create entries, but processing those entries would also generate this error and the posts themselves wouldn't appear on the blog's home page.
Checking my /mt-database/ directory, I saw that my fileinfo.db file was 15MB, pretty large given my blog had less than 300 entries. A friend who provides my hosting later verified that the file was corrupt and full of garbage. He thinks the db file got corrupted, then the rebuild script started using up tons of memory and things went downhill from there.
I dug around and came across the
Rebuilding error, On date based archives thread.
I found the code change that Brad suggested at 2:48pm in that thread. That wasn't my issue -- I could rebuild date and index files OK -- only individual and category archives were a problem. But being stuck, I figured it wouldn't hurt to try. I made that change to my mt.pm file.
That solved the problem. Finally, I could rebuild. But two categories were missing (I have nearly 75 in all). Oddly, the listings were showing up instead for categories that were in a private test blog that I also maintain.
I tried adding the missing categories back into my main blog. Unfortunately, that simply overwrote any existing categories. For example, I was missing the categories with id numbers 1 and 2. So when I tried to recreate them, they got assigned id number 3 and 4 -- overwriting those that were there.
Not sure what to do, I killed off everything in my test blog then imported entries from my public blog to see how a fresh start would go. It went badly. For whatever reason, the import into my completely independent test blog ended up killing off tons of posts in my public blog.
Next, I killed the test blog, nuked all posts and cats in the real blog, then reimported the data. Hurray! I got the posts all back, and all my categories were also recreated. The rebuild problems were gone. As far as I could tell, the blog was working perfectly -- good news, as I had to leave for a week and my two other blog authors would be on their own.
Some bad, bad news, however. My categories were recreated, true -- but not the hierarchical structure. Subcategories were not assigned below regular categories, so at some point, I have the unfun task of redoing that.
Other bad news is that the original post ID numbers were not retained. Since they make up part of my file structure, it meant I had to set up redirects for all the old post URLs to the new ones. A script took care of this -- but I was amazed that an export/import didn't actually recreate the original ID entries, as well. That seems like a big oversight and something that ought to be fixed. Similar, categories names were given completely new numeric IDs than in the original blog.
Today, a week later, I created a new category. Then I reassigned an entry that was in another category to this new one. I then got a rebuild the site message.
When I tried to rebuild, I got an error like before, "Cannot allocate memory" relating to the ids.db file. Meanwhile, my fileinfo.db file has jumped to 3MB. I suspect it's been corrupted again.
At first, rebuild attempts only failed if I tried to redo either individual entry pages or category pages. Now it's just individual entry pages. As for creating new entries, I also get the cannot allocate memory error.
I'm having the old data restored from yesterday, from when we last had entries. That should get things up and running and without the nightmare of losing original entry numbers. However, I still have no idea what's causing this corruption bug to happen. Any help is appreciated. I can't see that I'm doing anything wrong on my end. I'm wondering if MT simply cannot handle the number of categories we are using.
Other data. Public blog is blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog, running MT 3.11