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I don't really like to write this blog, but I'm too angry with the panels module.

I knew panels for a while and really like the feature this module brings to Drupal. It allow you to create nested design without touching the code. But it drove me mad today.

Today, I decided to use panels to restructure my frontpage, add some of my personal feeds and so on. Everything went fine but network connection was quite slow. I thought it was normal. If you live in Vietnam, having a slow ADSL is something you must accept, especially when you use the cheapest package.

And when I nearly finished the frontpage, I made a serious mistake: flush all cache. Since then my site was really really really really slow and I could not access anything at all. I checked the error log:

[Wed Apr 08 08:02:02 2009] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] Premature end of script headers: index.php
[Wed Apr 08 08:02:44 2009] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] Premature end of script headers: index.php

It means PHP output malformed header, sometime because PHP errors but It isn't useful because you don't know the header so you can't debug the problem.

What next ? I checked the watchdog table, and it gave me a better explanation. There were a lot of internal_error.html not found log ( I don't really know why ) and some error logs said: The specialized Panels menu router rebuild failed. Some paths may not work correctly.. Then the site was slow because Drupal were re-building the menu route. I googled the error message and got into a drupal issue. Too Great, the issue is a wont-fix-issue, the author say he doesn't have enough information and whatsoever (why didn't he change the status to "need more info" instead of "won't fix" ?).

Ok, so far I knew that panels module was unstable and I had to disable it manually. I followed the introduction on Drupal to disable all panels module manually. And then cleared the cache. But, it was no use at all :O . Same error kept happening. Ok, I was really mad at that time. I ran a query to completely remove panels modules from my site, clear the cache. And things came back to normal, without my whole afternoon work. Sh!t!

I hope merlinofchaos, the maintainer of panels module, quickly solve the problem because panels is really useful for Drupal developer. If someone falls the same trap as mine, all you have to do is executing this query and use drupal to clear the cache (don't try emptying the cache table, it's no use).

DELETE FROM system WHERE name LIKE "%panels%"

This will get you out of the mess :-(

Image from flickr.