[Solved] Johnny not responding to PHP

[freelio]

When I hit sites that use PHP, I get a 504 Gateway Time-out from nginx.  Started about an hour ago.

[freelio]

Now it's 502 Bad Gateway.

[jchal]

Also getting 502 Bad Gateway or 504 Gateway Timeout - not necessarily PHP related - just for a regular static HTML page.

[wolstech]

Appears to be working again.

Keep in mind that these errors are normal during Apache restarts on Johnny (502) and Tommy (appears as a 504 instead of a 502), and can last  up to 10 minutes. Apache restarts occur about every 2 hours. https://wiki.helionet.org/502_Bad_Gateway

Morty users don't experience these because the restarts complete in seconds due to the server being both much faster/newer, and less crowded.

[freelio]

I have doubts that this was simply a routine restart symptom: 

1. The error was a 504 timeout (not 502 until right before it started working again) and it was on Johnny
2. It lasted for about an hour
3. Right before it started working, plain HTTP non-PHP sites briefly gave errors, as @jchal reported

I've grown accustomed to the periodic mini-outages of PHP sites on Johnny.  This was a different error and much longer, which is why I reported it.

[wolstech]

A 504 on Johnny usually means the server is overloaded or a script that is too heavy or broken (it's caused by a timeout due to something that can't finish fast enough). Could be anything from DDoS to someone else overusing resources.

Lets see if Krydos might have more information on what happened, as the load charts I can see on our side only show the past hour...

 

[Krydos]

It looks like there were a few 504 errors on the domain stimulance.co between 2026-04-22 15:17:50 and 2026-04-22 16:31:18. I checked the load for Johnny during that range and it was between 9.32 and 16.14 so pretty normal and not too bad. 504 errors like this on PHP can happen due to quite a few things such as DDoS, zombie PHP processes, or just too many people trying to use PHP at the same time. Generally an Apache restart clears it up or if it's a DDoS it clears itself once the attacking IPs are blocked or stop attacking. It also kind of depends on your software. Some PHP software like Wordpress is extremely bloated and normal page loads take 5-10 seconds on Johnny anyways. If your PHP software is super slow on a good day, then it's even more likely to show a 504 error when the server is busy. Highly optimized fast PHP sites that normally only take 100 milliseconds to load a page on a good day may slow down to 5 seconds per page load when the server is busy, but won't show a 504 error.

Wolstech already said it, but the best option is to upgrade to Morty https://heliohost.org/dashboard/move/ if you want better uptime. Our mission as a non-profit is to provide free hosting to as many people as possible so the free plan is kind of overloaded by design. Our mission isn't to provide 100% uptime, super-fast, free hosting to only 10 people, so as long as the uptime is above 97% we consider it "good enough" for a free plan and load as many more free users as we can on there.