Often 500 Interal Server Errors

[bigblackboxx]

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[Guest Geoff]

What could be happening:

 

1. We have a process limit that limits the number of processes per user.

2. Your site is running a lot of processes.

3. When you connect to FTP, a new process starts up and you go over your limit

4. Your site returns a 500 because you can't start a new process to serve the request.

 

Do you have a web cron? What scripts are you using?

 

Just what I expected:

 1970 boxx      16   0 11512  924  708 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.05 imapd
6701 boxx      15   0 11512  900  704 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 imapd
6716 boxx      16   0 11512  900  704 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 imapd
14829 boxx      15   0 93984 1020  768 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.44 pure-ftpd

 

Those 'imapd' processes are causing the 500 errors.

[bigblackboxx]

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[Guest Geoff]

hmm not sure what or why there are 3 imapd processes running? I do have my mailbox on my local system set up to receive mail for my domain. (ie: admin@domain.com) Would that account for those 3 processes running?

 

That's probably it. Every time you connect to our server to check your mail, it starts an imapd process. Those imapd processes are 'squeezing out' your PHP processes that run your site.

 

You might consider using Google apps or something else, as it will prevent this problem from happening.

 

From our end, we have a couple of options:

 

1. Raise the process limit: higher risk of you increasing the server load & your account being suspended because of that

2. Kill the imapd processes: Would cause errors when connecting to imap, your connections would be dropped while checking mail, your mail client would show errors.

[bigblackboxx]

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[Guest Geoff]

Right now I'm not seeing any processes on your user account. I don't know why you were getting 'random 500 errors', wait and see if they occur again.

[jje]

Looks like there are no 500 Internal Server Errors on http://BigBlackBoxX.com/ anymore.