I have just been poking around my web host with my FTP client, and found a huge file called error_log. It’s about 41MB.
Peeking at it, it seems to have entries like this one:
[07-Nov-2006 07:11:11] PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library './/usr/local/lib/ixed.4.3.lin' - .//usr/local/lib/ixed.4.3.lin: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 [05-Oct-2006 19:25:17] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/privatedirname/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php:102) in /home/privatedirname/public_html/wp-rss2.php on line 8
… over and over again. In fact, it seems to be every 4 seconds since the 5th Oct last year, and since the timestamp is now, it still seems to be growing.
What does it mean? How can I fix it?
Niles's Blog 
This is based on some slightly hazy memory…
But, error_log is produced by Apache (the web server), depending on the location this could be being produced by PHP.
In any case, it’s indicating that somewhere your site has a page that’s got some iffy PHP in it that’s not quite working correctly. The second message is definitely wordpress related.
To be honest unless you have pages of the site which aren’t working I wouldn’t worry too much about it. You could always delete or empty out the error_log periodically to prevent it growing too huge.
If you’re using hosted space, you’re unlikely to have the kind of access you’d need to really dig into this..
You could try looking at the access_log for apache and seeing if you can marry up the error timestamp with an access timestamp to narrow down which page or script is causing the problem?
Hi,
Yep – iffy PHP script – in this case, the file that serves up the RSS feeds for your blog.
Upgrading WordPress might do the trick, and if the error is occuring very frequently it may be that someone is hitting your RSS feed too often – the error log may include the IP address of the person who is hitting your RSS feed over and over.
R
Not sure if I can get access to server logs with Dataflame? They aren’t anywhere obvious, anyway.
My host was threatening me with them updating my WP installation anyway, which doesn’t seem to have happened. It seemed easier to let them do it than faff around mesen!