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

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'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.

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.