How to Fix the Content Encoding Error in Your vBulletin Forum

I have a Linux VPS from the awesome guys at Linode. Usually has great uptime but recently the server had been crashing constantly over the past 2-3 days. Had to keep going back to my Virtualmin control panel to reboot.

Here’s a list of things I did in the order in which I did them to try to figure out the issue:

1. Updated WordPress to the latest version on all my sites and all the plugins
2. Contacted my server administrator to take a look at the Nagios logs and Linode graphs (which are awesome)
3. Opened one of my forums running vBulletin and got a big fat error message…

Opened the vBulletin forum up in Firefox and this is the message that showed:

Content Encoding Error
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

Finding the Cause of the Content Encoding Error

So I did tons of research on blogs and forums trying to find a cure for this vBulletin Content Encoding Error. On one prominent blog, the blogger felt that this issue was due to double compressing of the output. The thing is that vBulletin can automatically generate web pages in GZIP format as its HTML output. This is independent from the gzipping done by the web server. So he thought, just go into the vBulletin control panel, and go to vBulletin Options > Cookie and HTTP Header Options > and then set GZIP HTML Output to No.

This is not the solution for most people – leave the GZIP on.

Take a look at the emails you’re getting in the email inbox of the account you have set up in vBulletin to receive any error messages (vBulletin Options > Site Name/URL/Contact Details >Webmaster’s Email: Email address of the webmaster). I checked mine and found this:

vBulletin Database Error!

Database error in vBulletin:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT *
FROM vb_mailqueue
ORDER BY mailqueueid
LIMIT 10;

MySQL Error   : Got error 134 from storage engine
Error Number  : 1030
Request Date  : Wednesday, April 6th 2011 @ 11:14:03 PM
Error Date    : Wednesday, April 6th 2011 @ 11:14:03 PM
Referrer      :
Username      : Unregistered
Classname     : vB_Database
MySQL Version :

Solution to Content Encoding Error

I noticed in the error message it referred to a specific table (meaning inside the MySQL database) called vb_mailqueue. So I opened my phpmyadmin and went to that website’s database.

I first ran a Check on all tables and got these errors on that vb_mailqueue table:

Error: Record-count is not ok; is 173 Should be: 183
Warning: Found 82316 deleted space. Should be 77280
Warning: Found 165 deleted blocks Should be: 155
Error: Corrupt

So I ran a Repair and then I ran an Optimize.

Everything is now running perfect again.