query_posts breaking when a large number of results on one server [closed]

Question

The following code:

$params = array(
    'post_type' => 'game',
    'post_status' => 'publish',
    'posts_per_page' => -1,
);

$posts = get_posts($params);

works fine on my dev environment (MAMP), but when I try to run it on our staging environment (Apache on Linux) I get a 500 error (absolutely nothing in the source) with no error's in the error log.

When I narrow it down, I notice that if I set the posts per page to greater than 37 (we have approximately 60 posts on staging, from which I have recently updated my dev database from (meaning post 38 is in my dev as well)), all is well. All is also well when I set posts_per_page to 30, and add the parameter 'paged' => 2 (so post 38 isn't causing a problem). I have also tried setting posts_per_page to 40 and paged to 2 which currently works fine, but I suspect that is because we don't have over 80 posts.

Any idea's as to what else I could try, or what is likely to be the problem?

Answer 1

im stumped.

try split it into multiple queries.

$count_posts = wp_count_posts('game');
$pages = $count_posts->publish/20;
$page = 0;

while($pages > 0){
    $pages--;
    $page ++;   

    $params = array(
        'post_type' => 'game',
        'paged' => $page,
        'posts_per_page' => 20
    );

    $posts = get_posts($params);
    //Loop here    
}