Between 30-August-2013 and 01-September-2013, Complete, Concrete, Concise had its web hosting suspended with a demand that the WordPress installation be deleted.

Not wanting to delete my installation and then reinstall (and hopefully restore all data correctly), I investigated.

Note: this problem and solution is likely the same for any PHP based application – like Joomla! or Drupal.

Symptoms

Most likely, your web hosting provider will inform you that your account has been suspended because your WordPress (or other PHP based application) is generating a lot of core dumps and playing havoc with their server. In my case, I was asked to delete my WordPress installation.

Alternately, you may notice there are a lot of core.xxxx (xxxx being a four digit number) files in your WordPress directory.

The Cause

There may be other causes for core dumps, but this is what was causing mine.

When your error_log file gets to be 2,147,483,647 bytes long, PHP will start crashing and generating core dumps. This is because PHP cannot handle files larger than 2GB.

error_log is where PHP stores messages about any errors it encounters.

The most common cause of errors is a corrupt MySQL database file.

I suspect this is a fairly common problem but I could only find it mentioned here.

PHP’s failure in dealing with files larger than 2³¹ – 1 bytes long is documented here (although, the expression “unexpected behaviour” doesn’t really do it justice). To be fair, the PHP documentation claims this is only a problem on 32-bit systems – however, since I don’t know if my web host is running a 32 or 64 bit version of Linux, I can’t say anything other than “it is really stupid to not fail gracefully at a known hard limit”.

The Fix

When your account is suspended, you will probably only have ftp access.

Delete the file error_log.
rename index.php to something else (xxx_index.php is good)
inform your hosting provider that:
1. you suspect the problem was PHP’s inability to handle and error_log larger than 2GB and you have deleted it
2. you have deactivated your WordPress account by renaming index.php
3. you would like access to your account restored so you can run MySQL applications to check and repair your database if necessary
Fix the database (if it is corrupted). Instructions for checking and repairing a database can be found here.
restore the name of the file in step (2) back to index.php
go to your website and browse a few pages.
verify that core.xxxx files are not being generated. If they are being generated, than you probably have some other problem.
verify that the file error_log is not being generated. If it is being generated, it is a good idea to look at it and see what errors are occurring. Depending on how quickly error_log is growing, it might be a good idea to suspend your site again by renaming index.php