I can see now that I made the right move by uninstalling this terrible programming. No support here at all, and once JoomSEF was removed, all problems were magically gone. What a crappy extension.

I've spent more than a day working on nothing but this problem, and still have no solution. But in that time, I've made some observations.

1. In addition to the links we can see pointing back to JoomSEF, there are invisible links placed all over my site. I always wondered how that clown was able to get those porn links on the bottom of my page that time. Now I have my answer.

2. This entire problem revolves around a major memory leak caused by the programming of this extension. I'm unsure of specifically what generates the memory leak and allows it to persist, but I am certain that bad programming is the cause, and I really have no choice but to remove this eroneous programming from my server, because it creates and unnecessary load on my system resources.

In reading your uninstall instructions, I see that it says that the database tables will remain. What happens if I remove them via phpmyadmin? Also, does this uninstall remove all of those invisible backlinks you spammed my pages with, or do I have to look all of those up manually and remove them?

I know you aren't in the habbit of answering questions on this forum. I can see that only Jan answers questions and she answers no more than a few per day, often less, but if you could find time to give me some clarification on the uninstall, I would appreciate it. I dont really expect you to, but considering that the poor programming of this extension has kept my site unusable, I think it's the least you can do.

If I am understanding you correctly, your problem was that your pages were taking too long to be rendered, and that your solution was to bump up the max threshhold that the server allows. But the question remains as to what causes it to take so long to be rendered in the first place. You're treating the symptom rather than the illness.

It's a shame to see someone having fatal errors get ignored, especially when answering the question would have resolved similar problems faced by other users. Very poor support, and very poor programming to even have this problem in the first place. Thumbs down.

I guess if people in the paid section aren't getting answers then I stand absolutely no chance. :-(

The core issue here is that 128M is apparently not enough for JoomSEF to allow the page to be rendered. My question is...Why? What kind of memory leak requires such a substantial amount of memory and what needs to be done to correct it?

Failing that, is there some instructions for safely removing this component without damaging my site or it's content?

I installed the free edition of JoomSEF on a site late last year. It was always my intention to upgrade to the paid version (simply to remove the signature) once it was working properly, but unfortunately, that never happened and I couldn't see myself paying for something that keeps crashing my site. I ultimately ended up turning off the site until I could devote more time to tracking down the cause of this problem, and now that I have the time available, I would like to address this problem.

Basically, my problem is that if I go to the front page of the site, I stand about a 75% chance of being greeted with the following error.



It doesn't happen 100% of the time, but the majority of the time. It always references JoomSEF and always references the same line number of the code. I never had this problem prior to installing JoomSEF on the site, my database is optimized, and there is nothing else that could be causing the problem.

I've spent most of the day searching the Internet for a solution to this problem. I see a large number of posts, both on this forum and on others, which attribute the problem to JoomSEF, but I have not seen a single post that contained any form of solution, or even a suggestion to a possible solution. Given that it seems to be somewhat common (due to the large number of people having the issue), I have to assume that this is a known issue that has a known solution.

The only thing I have been able to do so far is to increase my memory size. I increased from 32M to 64M, and that didn't help. Then I bumped it up to 128M and I still get the problem. I could very well go up to 256, but there's no reason to believe that will solve anything, and I really shouldn't have to anyway. In fact, I really shouldn't have to even devote 128M to this one site. There has to be a better answer than this, especially since this one doesn't solve the problem.

What am I suppose to do to stop JoomSEF from causing these fatal memory crashes? If this post doesn't contain enough information to assess the problem, then please let me know what information you need, but I'm pretty sure the good folks at Artio are already aware of what I'm talking about, and hopefully know how to fix it.

Joomla version 1.5.12
JoomSEF version 3.5.5

That is not correct.

I never change the configuration and I routinely encounter situations where link addresses do not work properly unless I update or purge.

For example, I just created a section and category that is fed by rss. I then created a menu link to each. But when I type in mysite.com/category-name/blog I get a 404. Purging will correct this problem.

I'm not really wondering what situations lead to this. I encounter them frequently and know what they are. I just simply want to know which option is better - update or purge?

Which is better for the long-term health of my database?

I had solved this yesterday, but when I came back to post the solution, the site was down. Should anyone in the future be experiencing this, the problem was simply that I did not have a menu item associated with the category.

In inspecting the links, I noticed that Joomsef had all the problem links ending in "itemid=1". When I looked this up, I saw that it referred to the menu that the category was listed in.

Solution - I created a new menu called file library and left the module info blank, so that it is not displayed on the web site. I then created menu links to all of these categories, then went back to JoomSEF and purged all of the existing links. Everything works beautifully now.

Funny, I've been using Joomla for 3 years on a dozen sites and have never encountered this. I had no idea that you weren't allowed to have a category without it being associated to a menu. I guess you never stop learning. ;)

Thank you, Jan. I do appreciate your time very much.

Here is an example of what I am talking about:



Scroll down slightly until you are under the slideshow, and you will see a section titled "Sc###es Gear". I mention this one first because this is stationary - the other links I was talking about may rotate off before you get to the site. Anyway, I currently have this under:

Section: demo
Category: demo content 2
Article: Gear Up

(there are also categories for demo content 1 and demo content 3, if that matters).

The section, category and article are all published. When you click the link, it points to the correct url (or at least I think it is correct):



However, as you can see, the link loads the front page instead of loading the article. Even if you copy and paste the url directly into the address bar, you get the same result. In the case of this link, I get the same problem even if I try to paste the old joomla url into the browser, so that might be a clue:



--

The other area where I have noticed this problem, and the place I was talking about last night, is also on the front page. If you scroll down on the page to where you see "Sports Newswire" on the right column, any links that say they are from "Misc Sports" have this same problem. I'm not sure if any other categorieshave this problem, but at least some of the others (NHL, NBA, MLB, etc) do not have this problem.

At the moment, the top item I see listed is a title in Misc Sports, which points here:



And again, the original link has the same problem:



Also, if you were to click on the category link there for Misc Sports:



and the original:




Now, in the case of Misc Sports, I'm fairly sure I was clicking these links just fine prior to SEF, but I'm not sure about the link to S Gear. I have a feeling that it is something to do with the category itself, so a couple of notes about these categories:

1. They have unique names that are not shared by any other category. I dont think that would matter though, because I have several sections that have generic categories, like Teams, Scores, etc, and those categories are all functioning normally.

2. The only thing I am aware of that is different from these categories and the ones that are working is that the problem categories do not have any menu links pointing to them - they are just categories to hold content for my modules to pull articles from. I don't see why that should matter as long as the category and article are valid, but maybe I'm learning something new here. Does publishing a menu link to a category have any relevence??

I'm going to keep investigating this and will let you know if I find the solution, or if you think of anything, I would really appreciate the advice.

Thanks again, Jan. You're doing a remarkable job keeping track of all these threads.

Added Note: I'm not sure that it matters, but what I am viewing this site on is Windows 7 + IE8. I get the same problem with Windows 7 + Firefox 3.5.8

Wow, just when I thought I was finished with this problem...

It seems that links from a particular category are still having that problem. Now that I think about it, the links I had problems with before were also from the same category, so I guess enabling mod_rewrite didn't fix it at all, it was just coincidence that different links were on the page at the time I did that change.

3am here so I'll probably do better tomorrow with a rested brain. I just thought I would leave a note here in case anyone has a suggestion on where to look.

I have a similar problem and was searching past posts. I see this one was never addressed, so I wanted to bump this in case someone has the answer.

JoomSEF seems to work find on about 90% of the links throughout the site, but I have noticed that some links just refresh the page. So far I have only noticed these on the front page, and could not replicate the problem on any internal pages.

One strange thing about it is that it gets the same problem even if I copy and paste the url into a different browser. Example:



You'll notice it loads the front page rather than loading the article that it should be pointing to.

What could cause the link to just load the front page like this?

I am trying to think of some options here, but I don't know enough about JoomSEF to make a determination. I do know that the links in that area worked fine prior to JoomSEF. I also know that there is a published article that it should be linking to, it's just that JoomSEF is not bringing up the right location, for whatever reason.

I also wonder if it may be category specific. These links are from content that is stored in a Section and Category, but there are no menu links or anything else pointing to the category. Could that cause a problem? I don't see any reason why it should matter, but again, I'm not yet fluent in JoomSEF, so I don't want to rule out anything as a possibility.

Update: Whatever the conflict is, it seems to be stopping the "Latest News" from updating too.


Solved: Now that I've solved it, I feel like I should be wearing a dunce cap. ;)

Should anyone else experience this in the future, go to Global Configurations in the Joomla Admin panel and check your Apache mod_rewrite. I had forgot to turn mine on. Once I enabled it, the problem cleared up. I'm still baffled as to why only front page articles had this problem, but as long as it works now, I'm happy.

Thank you jan, I honestly appreciate you taking the time to answer. :)

I would like to use the free version on a site that I have in development, then upgrade it to the professional version when it is time for the site to go live. I wanted to ask if this is an easy process, or if it is better to just go with the pro version from the start.