Thread

This afternoon I began recieving 500 errors from pages specifically built on one template (some pages were built on a copy of the template). When the errors began, no one was logged in and I cannot find the problem. Am running on 1.6.7 build 20090122. Checked the servers and all seems to be working fine there.

The site this is occuring on is http://www.urbana.edu

I don’t suppose you have access to the server error logs?  Error 500s are notoriously vague and hard to troubleshoot; there could be vitally important information in those error logs.

Also, can you show us the contents of your .htaccess file?

.htaccess file is empty

I don’t have direct access to server logs, but if you can let me know what to look for, I can have our techs nose around.

I’d like to see any recent error messages. 

While you’re at it - these 500 errors don’t just occur out of nowhere; you might ask if they made any server changes in the last 48 hours.

I see you’re getting a bunch of blank pages too, though I don’t see 500s.  Can you go to Admin -> Utilities -> PHP Info and look for display_errors and let us know what that says?

display_errors is off for both local and master

Alright, we’re going to absolutely need that on, and that is a server-side configuration.  Once that is on we can turn them on in EE and get a real view of what is going on; but EE’s settings won’t work if the server is suppressing them.

I work on getting that turned on.

I checked the error log on a subsite—sports.urbana.edu—and found this. I use the same favicon in the main site

[Thu Jun 04 16:24:27 2009] [error] [client 207.230.144.240] File does not exist: /home/uuweb/www/sports.urbana.edu/assets/images, referer: http://sports.urbana.edu/index.php/women/
[Thu Jun 04 16:24:28 2009] [error] [client 207.230.144.240] File does not exist: /home/uuweb/www/sports.urbana.edu/favicon.ico

That looks like a 404 for the favicon, not a huge deal and wouldn’t cause this kind of chaos.

Though if you’ve set up a favicon you might want to figure out why it’s not coming up. But we should focus on the bigger issue. =)

I found the error log and our tech will get the display_error turned on in a while.

Everything I am seeing in the error log is “file does not exist” usually referring to our old site architecture. This site was launched in April.

What is ERROR_REPORTING set to?

error_reporting is set to 6143

In reviewing error log again, I found this:

[Thu Jun 04 15:28:32 2009] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Thu Jun 04 15:28:33 2009] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec)
[Thu Jun 04 15:28:36 2009] [notice] Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) configured—resuming normal operations

In reviewing error log again, I found this:

[Thu Jun 04 15:28:32 2009] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Thu Jun 04 15:28:33 2009] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec)
[Thu Jun 04 15:28:36 2009] [notice] Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) configured—resuming normal operations

That’s bad, it means Apache’s going down. Please talk to your server admin about this.

Turned out this was a server memory issue. Once we increased the memory on the server, it was solved. Thanks for the help!