[Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki parially stopped working

[Agon S. Buchholz]

Hi,

a few months ago, I installed MediaWiki 1.9, created some hundred nodes
and all appeared to work like a charm: Creating articles, deleting,
moving, or editing them, all reasonably fast and relaible.

Now, after several weeks of operation, the installation has partially
ceased to work: Entering an existing term in the Search box has no
effect - the browser claims to request the page, but nothing happens
(nothing = no page showing up, and no timeout appearing after several
minutes/hours). Sometimes - but not reproducable - the requested page
appears, when I directly enter the page's full URL in the browser's
location bar. Creating new pages seems no longer to work at all. I
haven't changed the configuration in LocalSettings.php for weeks, and I
haven't noticed having changed anything else on the server (running
under Debian "Etch" since it was released).

However, when I do a "tail -f" on the webserver's logfiles, requests
from spiders and external browsers are hushing by with a pretty high
frequency (several files requested per second). What appears *really*
strange to me is, that requests for pages from my own browser (Opera
9.2.1/Win) don't appear in access.log, as long as I use Opera, where I'm
logged in to the Wiki; when I switch to Firefox (2.0.0.4/Win, not logged
in to the Wiki), those requests start to appear in access.log.

Sticking with Firefox, entering page names of existing articles results
in delivering the article and showing up in access.log; however, when
entering non-existing article names (in order to create them), those
requests don't appear in access.log, and MediaWiki delivers no page
(search result etc.), like with Opera. It's also mostly the same result,
if I enter a new term in the Search box or directly via the URL location
(.../w/index.php?title=New_Article&action=edit). Directly after
rebooting the server, sometimes creating new articles does work again
when directly entering the new article's URL, but only once.

Another LAMP application on the same host (Drupal) is working fine (more
or less, and very slow, but however it's still working), so basically
Apache, MySQL, and PHP seem to work.

This is a pretty bizarre scenery: In the background of my desktop is a
shell, where requests logged to /var/log/apache2/access.log continuously
are floating by, on the same time being unable to load or even edit a
single page on my own Wiki... ;-/

/var/log/syslog and ../messages don't show anything unusual.

In LocalSetting.php, I enabled

   $wgShowExceptionDetails = true;
   $wgDebugLogFile = "debug.log";

However, a "debug.log" is not being created in the wiki directory (or
according to locate anywhere else on the server).

Any hints where and how I could look what's going wrong?

Thanks & regards, -asb