Thread

Hello,

Our server crashed at a critical moment when we were starting to live stream an important interview.  The number of site visitors at the time the server started getting stressed wasn’t a ton, though more than usual for that time frame - between 200-300, most of whom were attempting to load the site in anticipation of the interview. Within a 20 minute period the server load spiked to around 89% and then became unresponsive as Apache attempted to save itself, we ended up calling the server company and rebooting Apache.

These are the error messages most prevalent in the Apache error log at the time of the crash:

1. Premature end of script headers: index.php (most prevalent)
2. File does not exist: /public_html/favicon.ico

Just so you know:

1. Template caching was not enabled at the time. (it is now)
2. All broken image links were being sent to my custom EE 404 page (this is no longer the case)
3. Favicon.ico was not located in the root directory (it is now).
4. We’re using a Virtual Private Server with plenty of memory for a site of our size.

Can you tell me what caused the server load to spike so severely? What more can I do to prevent this in the future? This crash happened at the worst moment and was definitely a big deal.

You should really be asking your hosting company for more details.  We’ve had sites that crashed under heavy load before, it was almost always because the server ran out of memory (RAM) and so it crashed.  Most likely you’ll need a dedicated server with a good amount of RAM. Again though, your hosting company should be able to tell you exactly what happened and what they suggest.

Premature end of script headers is almost as ambiguous as Error 500s.  Like Phire_SK said, this would be best discussed with your host; they may be able to shed some light on exactly what is happening.

Thanks Phire_SK!