Wordpress Blank Screen

Recently, I dedicated many many hours to detect a problem that –apparently- did not have a quick solution by googling on Internet.

For any reason, Global Translator + Wordpress + Apache combination, caused a strange symptom in my Wordpress installation, that involved MySQL database. Another strange symptom was that no log messages were recorded so that made more difficult to detect the problem.

 

Finally, I noticed a strange number of rows under wp_options table, while browsing the database using phpMyAdmin.

The following entries were repeated infinitely as option_name entries:

• gltr_enable_debug
• gltr_enable_client_translation
• gltr_prioritize_client_translation
• gltr_suppress_meta

While looking these entries, more than 2.300.000 records were found under wp_options table. Definitely it had something strange there.

Well, after doing a database backup, I decided to delete those entries, by running this command in phpMyAdmin:

delete from wp_options where option_name LIKE "gltr_%"

Another strange behavior was that everything worked very well when running under Lighttpd, but the blank screen appeared on Apache. Finally, I guessed that would be something related to a Timeout while running a php script and doing a query in the database.