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As most of you have noticed, and probably fought with I'm sure over the past month or so. The Website was exhibiting random "Blank Page" or "White Page" errors. This issue was also causing other mods and functions, such as TapaTalk from working properly, or at all.
I am happy to announce that after much frustration, (long waits on hold, multiple support calls/chats/emails to the Webhost support, whole lot of digging on my own part to figure out the root cause, and a serious look at self hosting the website myself including going as far as setting up IIS and copying all backups of Website files and Database to my personal server), The problem finally appears to have been resolved. Yes, this also means that TapaTalk is finally working once again as well.
Due to how the fix was implemented (FastCGI instead of ISAPI), There might be some errors with certain pages, or functions, that might have slipped by (Special PHP.INI settings on specific directories). So PLEASE, if you notice any errors, problems, or whatever, Let me know so I can correct them as they pop up.
Technical Mumbo Jumbo that I'm sure no one will care about
The root cause seems to have been a change on the Webhost, where the Apache Process Limit was changed, or how it handles PHP requests and processes changed. I'm not sure exactly, who knows what they did to screw it up.
So after X amount of people were on the site, and X amount of page requests, the Process Limit was reached, cutting off any further requests, and causing a 500 Error page (Internal Server Error). Causing errors in the log to show as such,
Apparently the Webhost support was stumped, and kept suggesting PHP changes that I already tried. They even suggested going back down from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.2. Considering the work to get scripts to run that I already optimized and changed to work with PHP54, this was not going to happen. Especially since everything was working fine on 5.4 for some time before the issues started.
It took me digging into the issue myself, and even setting up a mirror of the site on my local server to test things out. Once I confirmed that I had no issues on my server running it, I knew it was on their end.
Fortunately I figured out a way to use FastCGI ont he webhost instead of the default ISAPI modules for the PHP processing. This cuts down on the overhead and keeps it from hitting the process limit.. hopefully.
I can't tell you how close I came to actually moving the whole website completely over to my local server.
Because FastCGI uses a single PHP.INI for it's settings, there might be issues on some sub-directories where I had special settings applied. Like the Gallery, Arcade, AdminCP, etc.. So if anyone notices problems using these, let me know. This also includes upload limits on videos, images, attachments, etc..
I am happy to announce that after much frustration, (long waits on hold, multiple support calls/chats/emails to the Webhost support, whole lot of digging on my own part to figure out the root cause, and a serious look at self hosting the website myself including going as far as setting up IIS and copying all backups of Website files and Database to my personal server), The problem finally appears to have been resolved. Yes, this also means that TapaTalk is finally working once again as well.
Due to how the fix was implemented (FastCGI instead of ISAPI), There might be some errors with certain pages, or functions, that might have slipped by (Special PHP.INI settings on specific directories). So PLEASE, if you notice any errors, problems, or whatever, Let me know so I can correct them as they pop up.
Technical Mumbo Jumbo that I'm sure no one will care about
The root cause seems to have been a change on the Webhost, where the Apache Process Limit was changed, or how it handles PHP requests and processes changed. I'm not sure exactly, who knows what they did to screw it up.
So after X amount of people were on the site, and X amount of page requests, the Process Limit was reached, cutting off any further requests, and causing a 500 Error page (Internal Server Error). Causing errors in the log to show as such,
Caused by SystemException in API_Linux.cpp:444: execve() for program "/ramdisk/php/54/bin/php54" failed: Resource temporarily unavailable, referer: http://www.darksidealliance.com/index.php
It took me digging into the issue myself, and even setting up a mirror of the site on my local server to test things out. Once I confirmed that I had no issues on my server running it, I knew it was on their end.
Fortunately I figured out a way to use FastCGI ont he webhost instead of the default ISAPI modules for the PHP processing. This cuts down on the overhead and keeps it from hitting the process limit.. hopefully.
I can't tell you how close I came to actually moving the whole website completely over to my local server.
Because FastCGI uses a single PHP.INI for it's settings, there might be issues on some sub-directories where I had special settings applied. Like the Gallery, Arcade, AdminCP, etc.. So if anyone notices problems using these, let me know. This also includes upload limits on videos, images, attachments, etc..
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