WordPress MU

I have been using wpmu for a few months now and am in the process of upgrading. In my current install, I have three files that seem to have been created by mu, sort of like error logs, but the contents is unreadable (lots of symbols) with a text editor. The names are core.12233, core.12235, and core.12236. They are all about the same size..around 28mb and they are all in the mu root.

My wpmu install is running fine I'm just unsure how these files got there.

Any idea what these are and do I need them?

Thanks in advance for help.

They're core dump files. May want to contact your host as it would be a server issue.

I'll give a "apache-server-for-dummies" explanation. Could be anything. The server dumps these files when it chokes on something in the code. Any script(gone bad) can create a server dump. I've seen them when a wp plugin has an error trying to create/update a database table with bad code. I can create them if I screw up a database update option. Follow Wordpress codex carefully when creating plugins that create database tables.

Example, say version 0.1 of some plugin creates options tables in the database. You revise the plugin with some 2.0 version but the db tables have changed in some way. If the revised plugin doesn't anticipate the old options tables already existed, and the plugin breaks, server dumps. And may keep dumping every time it executes the bad script.

Check the usual error logs for clues.
Delete the dumps if you can extract no clues of their cause. Their cause must be solved, though. If the cause is not fixed, the dumps will continue to the crack of doom.

Great...thanks for the quick help.

I do have quite a few mu and normal plugins installed. And I've hacked a few of them, so your explaination dsader gives me a good clue about where to start looking.

Oh...and one follow-up note for anyone else who may run into this. I didn't notice this before, but now I see that all three of those files were last updated (and I will assume created) on the same day about a month ago...right about the time I was doing some major hacking. So, after reading dsader's examples above, it makes a lot more sense to me now.

Thanks again.