July 18th in PHP Scripts by pbu .

Website shows up Blank Page and will not load!

i had experienced a nightmare situation with my site down for most of the hours. I checked my website as usual and it loads only blank page and the site is currently hosted with bluehost!

I checked the source code and error_log of the nothing i could trace this error. I opened the browser to see the source code expecting atleast the html code of the blank page. I could find 500 – Internal server error there! I know these internal server errors caused by incorrect lines in .htaccess file, i checked it and couldnt spot the error. I was desperate to bring my site online.

I got in touch with one of the bluehost technical support and there they told me to check the process manager and lookout for those processes running as multiple instances. In my case the culprit was captcha script (using gd library) and it just took up lot of ram and didnt release the memory and thereby causing PHP to fail. I killed those processes and sooner i did my site came back online. My site does use lot of captchas to restrict spam submissions.

Atleast i thought i could document it here!

4 Comments

BODHost.com : Managed VPS Hosting
July 19, 2008

In order not to repeat the same situation, have you restricted the number of captchas.
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pbu
July 21, 2008

i actually moved to recaptcha as the the current script i use for captcha doesnt stand good for more traffic. It is wierd that my site getting 20k uniques and for user registrations and submissions i use captcha.
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Jenny
December 23, 2008

Interesting article. I found some more information here
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web hosting
June 24, 2009

Just wanted to say thanks for the great post ! Found your blog on Google and I’m happy I did. I’ll be reading you on a regular basis ! Thanks again
Thanks,
Donna
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