We have been having some problems with Expression Engine for at least the past two weeks, most notably. I hope someone can point me to a solution.
Basically, when we try to update a template, or when we try to submit an entry, the page goes blank, as in white. As you know, normally, upon submitting an entry or updating a template, Expression Engine will direct your browser to display either a generic preview of the entry or return you to the template (on update) or the template management screen if the update and finished button is pressed. This still will happen still from time to time. But far more often lately, the automatic reload ends up on a blank page.
The blank page is not necessarily a bad thing, because it seems as though the entry or update is always registered by EE. In fact, if I reload the page after submitting an entry, it leads to a duplicate entry. If I am working on a template, and simply hit the back button on my browser, my changes always seem to be there. But as you can imagine, this white screen of death (so to speak), is very annoying. I estimate that on only 20 percent of the uploads or updates any more does Expression Engine take us back to the place we should end up.
It sounds like a php error is being thrown, and errors are suppressed. Could be a memory issue as well. What build/version are you running? And do you have ‘show php errors’ turned on for superadmins? If so, and you still get a white screen, make sure error reporting is turned on at the server level and/or try to force it- according to this kblog entry. NOTE- to force errors in the backend, edit the index.php file INSIDE the system folder.
You’re still not getting errors? Can you go here: Admin › Utilities › PHP Info, and do a find in page for “display_errors” and let us know what that column says?
Figures ... I say something to a tech and now the system is moving along very fast. Go figure.
Both columns are listing errors as on, but I haven’t received a single error since I began this thread. The number of white pages in the past two weeks have been too innumerable to count. Certainly they will return.
I will post again as soon as possible. Thanks for magically laying hands on my system ...
It took nearly the entire day, but last night and this morning the white screen error returned. We have display errors turned on; I am not seeing anything different, but maybe I’m looking in the wrong spot.
Our build version which I didn’t report earlier is 20070918.
Did you try forcing errors via the kblog entry? Also- let’s see if they’ll show on the frontend. Create a test template, turn php parsing ‘on’ for the template- paste:
<?php echo $booter; ?>
View the rendered page while logged in- do you get an error message?
Do you happen to know how much PHP memory you have allocated? Low memory is a common cause of blank screens, so if it’s low, you should get that upped and see if it helps.
We really need to be able to get errors - can you try that kblog entry that Robin pointed to and see if that helps?
We have 128mb of memory allocated. It can be increased, but shouldn’t that be enough?
We did update our build to 1.6.1 and 20071114.
I did enable the error reporting and inserted the line. I then tried updating a template I had been working on, and was greeted with a blank white page.
Hi, Jerry. we really need to get some errors going on here. Did you check with your admin about access to the server error logs? The errors may be going there, it’d be good to find out.
Also, are you saving templates as text files? Or running any extensions?
We have been logging errors for 24 hours. In that time, we have recorded only one PHP error from Expression Engine, and that error was from a different licensed version and Web site. Perhaps I have not followed the KB article properly.
Our server has a php directory in the root. Within this directory is the expsys folder. Both folders have the error_reporting line. In the root folder, the index.php file is clearly an EE document (It is labeled as such at the top of file.) I changed the error_reporting(0) line to error_reporting(E_ALL) as you requested. After each instance of the black screen, I checked the error log on the server. I have yet to find an error report from EE. Thinking maybe I hadn’t changed the proper error_report line. I went into the expsys index.php file which consists of just a few lines, including the error_reporting. I changed that one too. I have yet to find a single error reported by Expression Engine.
Have I erred in changing both?
The problems became more apparent a few weeks ago after we started using cache system. Could this blank screen be related to the cache?
I have a strange situation. Starting last night, we started getting messages when trying to load an Expression Engine page stating that the database server appears to be offline or the config file is not configured for our database. We have a HTML site for it’s index page that uses a couple of IFRAMES to show Expression Engine content. The HTML page loads fine but the Expression Engine content sometimes will display the error or if I reload once or twice, the Expression Engine content will load. The CPU will be maxed out at 100% during this time. If I disable Expression Engine, CPU usage returns to normal levels (approx. 20% CPU usage on average) but once I bring the site back online, it instantly goes to 100% CPU usage. If I restore our Expression Engine database back to a couple of days ago, the entire site will run fine for awhile until our website content people update the site and then it will crash again.
Can you please offer any advise as to what I can do to fix this problem or somewhere to look at? I’m a tech guy, so I don’t know anything about web page coding or anything, but I’m thinking some site content could be crashing EE, or maybe some sort of EE database corruption?
1) Version and build of EE?
2) Have you checked your statistics logs for any unusual spam or bots? Referrer spam can cause this sort of thing.
3) If you use just the default template, does the same thing occur?
4) What modules, plugins, and extensions are you running?
We just upgraded late last week (Thursday, Nov. 29th) to the latest version which is 1.6.1 build 20071114 .
Our statistics appear to be normal.
We have all modules enabled and also have purchased and are running version 2.0.0 of the discussion forum module.
We are not using any extentions or plug-ins except for blacklist, comment, discussion forum, photo gallery, RSS, search, and weblog.
We are not using the default template, according to the person who manages our website. I don’t know if that is an option to use the default template.
Is it possible to revert back to version 1.6.0 in case 1.6.1 is causing us a problem?
I know some database changes were made when I ran the update.php script and I also did the database optimization.
The person who submitted the topic “White Screen…” on page 2 of the Technical Support forum (currently) works with me (he’s our website content manager) and was asking me if the two could be related.
Can you check that your cache folders are manually removed (inside /system/cache) and that /system/cache/ is set to 777 permissions?
It would be good if you set up a template group with the default template to see if you get the same issue; it is very possible that there are issues within your template, we can rule those out easily without effecting your site, by just using a different template group for testing.
I just tried “updating” the default template and received the white screen. The only changes we have ever made to this template group were on basic text. The default tags in this group have been left intact since we installed EE.
