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Every morning I have loads of errors from Automate for 100s of sites

I have Automate working on about 100 sites and every morning I have loads of errors

The errors not always the same like

Apr 16, 2018 at 5:31am: Updated Enable Media Replace from 3.2.3 to 3.2.4

Apr 16, 2018 at 3:44am: Error updating Enable Media Replace from 3.2.3 to 3.2.4

Apr 16, 2018 at 3:44am: Error updating Gravity Forms MailChimp Add-On from 4.2 to 4.3

Apr 16, 2018 at 4:37am: Error updating Gravity Forms Campaign Monitor Add-On from 3.5 to 3.7

Apr 16, 2018 at 6:04am: Error updating Simple Page Ordering from 2.3 to 2.3.1

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 13:41:07
  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hello Shaun

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your question!

    I checked your chats to get a better picture of the issue but I’d like you to ask you few more questions:

    1. Was it happening since the beginning when you started using Automate or just recently?

    2. Those 100+ sites – are they hosted on the same server/account or different account with one host or different hosts even?

    3. For all the sites affected – are there any

    a) additional “management” tools like e.g. ManageWP or similar installed apart from our WPMU DEV Dashboard?

    b) additional security tools that use external services (such as e.g. Sucuri)?

    c) any CDN implemented?

    d) a server-side cache, if so, what?

    I’m asking because I”m trying to find some “common point” here but maybe there’s anything else that seems “common” (aspect of configuration of the site or server, a plugin used everywhere, some “weird” behavior apart from that Automate issue) for all of them that you can think about? If so, let me know as well please.

    Kind regards,

    Adam

  • Darren
    • Director

    Hi,

    To answer your questions:

    1. Was it happening since the beginning when you started using Automate or just recently?

    Only recently really have there been this many issues.

    2. Those 100+ sites – are they hosted on the same server/account or different account with one host or different hosts even?

    They’re mostly on the same host, although not the same server.

    3. For all the sites affected – are there any

    a) additional “management” tools like e.g. ManageWP or similar installed apart from our WPMU DEV Dashboard?

    No

    b) additional security tools that use external services (such as e.g. Sucuri)?

    They are Sucuri scanned overnight but that’s at the server level. No plugins like that installed.

    c) any CDN implemented?

    Lots have Cloudflare but several of them don’t and they still present problems.

    d) a server-side cache, if so, what?

    Yes we have server-side cache, the sites are hosted by Flywheel.

    Thanks,

    Shaun

  • Predrag Dubajic
    • Support

    Hi Shaun,

    It looks like there are some issues on how your WordPress installation is showing available updates.

    When I checked your site there were 5 updates showing, I then updated Campaign Monitor from WP updates panel to see if it works from there and that worked fine.

    However, this is when the strange behavior started happening, if I go to your Plugins panel it shows that there are no updates available, but when I switch to Dashboard > Updates panel it still shows that there are 4 updates pending.

    But when I switch to plugins panel the pending updates are not shown again, even the update counter is gone from the navigation.

    You can see how your site behaves to me in this short video:

    https://monosnap.com/file/Dmhl6XRwIiVVaQgmQDXR0JsJskeSMZ

    This behavior can also affect Automate when it checks for the available updates on your site and show that the update is there but during the update process it then shows that there’s no update after all.

    Could you get in touch with your hosting provider so they can have a look at this and see if this could be related to their server-side caching or something else in their server configuration?

    Let us know how it goes.

    Best regards,

    Predrag

  • Darren
    • Director

    Hi,

    Whilst this does look to be a problem, that is actually a unique problem to that site (those plugins aren’t on any other site) and it’s different to what I’m having.

    For example on several other sites I got this error this morning:

    Apr 18, 2018 at 6:05am: Error updating Yoast SEO from 7.2 to 7.3

    When I log in and try to update it, it updates fine.

    So why does Automate have issues? Perhaps it should just try again, and not report it as an error? I’m getting fed up of every morning 50 emails saying error updating!

  • Predrag Dubajic
    • Support

    Hi Shaun,

    It’s possible that there was some temporary hiccup that prevented the plugins from being downloaded from their source.

    If it does happen again please let us know and grant us support access to the site in question, also include if the issue happened with the same plugin as before or a different one.

    Best regards,

    Predrag