Thread

Greetings,

A client’s site has suddenly (in the last week) begun to shut down due to 500 internal server errors.  The site has worked fine for months, and, without anything changing (to my knowledge), these errors have arrived.

I have been working with the hosting provider, HostGator, to resolve.  They say that a series of runaway processes, called through the index.php file, are exceeding the hosting limits and causing the error pages.  It is worth stating that this is a site with a very low activity level right now, as the client is still developing their content and market - twenty visitors a day would surprise me.  So I think site traffic can be safely ruled out as culprit.

I have several times had them kill the processes.  Sometimes this opens the site up for a brief period before the 500s return, sometimes to no avail.  Last evening I had the time to have the processes killed long enough to update the EE version from 1.6.2 to 1.6.6.  I also trouble-shot the directory permissions (they recommended that in their environment, all 777s should be 755s) and the .htaccess file (one line in the .htaccess was particularly suspicious - I had had lots of problems previously with EE not working in HostGator environments after the upgrade to PHP 5, so all my EE sites with HostGator have to run in PHP 4 ... there is a line in the .htaccess files for these sites specifying such).  After ruling out the permissions and .htaccess, I updated the EE install to current version.  It seemingly worked.  The processes were killed, the update script ran, and the site worked fine for the 10 minutes I explored and checked out its performance.

This morning, the 500s are back.  I don’t know what else to do.  The client’s site is completely down till these processes are curbed.  Again, the site worked perfectly for months, and no functional files had been changed to cause sudden problems (to my knowledge).

Please advise as to how to track down the cause of the processes (since they are called through the index.php in the root directory, doesn’t it have to be EE?).

Let’s see…Can you give us a list of extensions/plugins, and non ‘stock’ modules you are using? 

I’d go to CP Home ›  Admin ›  System Preferences ›  Output and Debugging Preferences and turn on template debugging and show mysql queries to superadmins.  Can you visit the page when you aren’t getting a 500, copy and paste the debugging code into a text file, zip it and attach it to the forum?

Also, other than the force php-5 you have in the .htaccess file, anything else in there?  Mod-Rewrites, etc.

The only non-standard module is freeform.  The only non-stock plugin is Share This! No Extensions. 

The CP is unavailable to me, as is the rest of the site, because everything brings 500 internal server errors.

The htaccess file contains:

# Use PHP4 as default
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php4 .php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

I will try to get the processes killed again long enough to access the CP, turn on the debugging, and send you the results, but it will take a while to get the hosting support to do it.

Thanks for help.

okay, ditch the url rewrite for the time being.  put “index.php” back in when you can access the CP once again.

Did this get solved? I’m having the exact same problem with Host Gator. The site returns to normal when I kill the processes from the cpanel, but there are sometimes only like 3 processes running and there is a 25 process limit. So, I don’t get it.

nomi, is there an .htaccess on the site?

I am having the same issue on a different host (fatcow.com). Either the page does not come up and I get the Internal Server Error message or the page comes up with out processing the style sheet (an EE template). The version of EE is from 07 so I guess I need to to update it. Any suggestions - before I do that - about changes I could make to prevent this?  Thanks so much for any adivce.

Dana

danakm:

The 500 error is basically the server screaming for help because it is either confused or angry.  Many things can contribute, eg:  .htaccess rewrite rules, poorly configured or overloaded server, and other things that can be hard to track down.

Given the age of your EE Install, I would recommend upgrading, however, you should speak to your host about the 500 errors and see what they say.

-greg

Thanks Greg

Looks like it is something going on on the server. Just got word of a different account with the same host using a much less complex content system - having the same error.

Dana

Well, some news is better than no news.  😊

After things are up and running with the server, definitely do look to upgrade you EE files.

-greg