145 Table '.../whos_online' is marked as crashed

[henryvuong]

The front end of my site displays this message:

145 Table './shocking_catalog/whos_online' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
in:
[delete from whos_online where time_last_click < '1210125508']

I followed the instruction in the Zen-Cart Wiki to fix the table. I opened phpMyAdmin, clicked the SQL tab and entered the query "REPAIR TABLE whos_online" then click "Go". After I did that, nothing has changed, my site is still showing the same error message. What am I missing?

I am still able to log in at the backend though.

My URL: http://shockingprice.com

[DrByte]

You should talk to your hosting company about that.

You may have to drop and recreate the table.

[henryvuong]

If I recreate the table, it would be empty. Will Zen-cart work with empty table?

[DrByte]

If the table is busted, you'll have to start with an empty table anyway.
Zen Cart will rebuild the whos_online data automatically ... the data in the whos_online table is only ever valid for 20 minutes anyway.

You do keep regular backups, don't you?

[henryvuong]

I dropped the table, created a new one and it worked. Thanks.

[fuzzball172]

what causes this to happen? I get this happening to both my whos_online and sessions tables on a regular basis. What can I do to resolve the issue?

[DrByte]

what causes this to happen? I get this happening to both my whos_online and sessions tables on a regular basis. What can I do to resolve the issue?

Those are probably the two tables that get the most "write" traffic, and are thus the most vulnerable to corruption if the database server hiccups in the middle of a "write".

Who's your hosting company?
What version of PHP and MySQL is your server running?
What's your store URL?

That kind of repeat table corruption typically only happens on servers whose MySQL engine can't handle the volume of traffic coming to it. An overloaded server or poorly-tuned server could have that sort of problem regularly. If the server's database system is hiccuping regularly, you'll end up with table corruption regularly too.