All sites stop working after a period of time

What issue or error are you experiencing?

Hi there, I’m not sure what is happening or where to check and see what’s going wrong, but it’s like all sites in Local just stop serving altogether after a period of time. When I say “stop serving” I mean that I can’t access the WP admin, refresh pages, save changes, etc on the WordPress side… The browser just keeps the loading animation going forever.

Stopping sites and then starting them again doesn’t resolve this. Restarting Local doesn’t resolve this. Occasionally, restarting my computer solves it… for a period of time. I have no idea what to search to see if this issue has already been documented and how to solve it but it’s driving me mad honestly! I’ll be mid-work and then everything just stops responding.

What I’ve tried so far:

  • Restarting individual sites
  • Restarting Local
  • Restarting my machine
  • File system check/permissions repair in Mac OS X
  • Updating Local
  • Reinstalling Local
  • Updating Mac OS X (I bought a whole new machine and the issue carried over!)
  • Changing router mode from site domains to localhost

What steps can be taken to replicate the issue? Feel free to include screenshots, videos, etc

  • Start site
  • Work on site as normal
  • After a period of time, sites stop responding

System Details

  • Local Version: Local Version 9.2.9+6887

  • Operating System (OS) and OS version: Mac OS X 14.6 Sonoma

  • Running a network filter, but Local is explicitly on the allowlist for any connection


Local Logs

(Logs are apparently too large to upload at 54.2 mb, so tell me which part of the log you would like and I will repackage it)

Hi @foundation!

Could you tell us more about your sites and workflows?

For example:

  • How many sites do you have in Local? How many of these do you Start and have running at the same time?

  • How long are you usually working on these sites? An hour, several hours? All day?

  • Do you Stop your sites when you are done, and close out of Local at the EOD?

  • Do you work on any sites with a lot of media, large DBs, multisites, e-comm, etc?

  • Does your device have a lot of disk space available?

Hi Nick-B!

  1. I have many sites in Local (20+) but usually only start 1 at a time (because of this issue).
  2. I will work on sites for several hours at a time. Usually 1 hour to several. Sometimes, I will try to work across multiple days.
  3. I do both but not in a dedicated manner. For example, today, I had a site running in Local for a couple of days. I wanted to work on another site, so I stopped that site and started the other one I wanted to work on. After working for a few minutes, the site stopped responding entirely.
  4. Yes, I work on all of these. The site I was attempting to work on today has a large database of media (but I have not copied the image files/media over for the time being)
  5. Currently, for today’s example, I have 30 GB of space available.

It may be worth noting that I have multiple profiles on my computer that I switch back and forth from (a work profile and a personal profile). I do not run Local on both profiles at the same time. I am not sure if account switching impacts Local, and this is why Local seems to work for the time being after a restart.

I don’t think there is necessarily one issue at play here but perhaps a few things. Here are some recommendations I’d make for next steps:

  • We have some articles below regarding large sites and performance issues. It’s possible that one or more of these larger installs could be contributing to bottlenecks. So it might be worth looking into potential optimization options such as cleaning up DBs, offloading media, reducing plugins, running tools like Query Monitor to investigate bottlenecks or investigating error data.
  • Moving forward we would recommend that as a best practice when you’re done working in Local you Stop all sites, and Quit the application.

  • The internet might debate the following, but I’d also recommend doing a full shut down of your device at least once or twice a week.