MovementZone=Fly

Banshee

Hey everyone! As a new initiative against the enemy attacks full of evil error 503 haunting this site, we've recently updated the news and content generation code for the PPM website, mobile site and few of its hostees, such as Twisted Insurrection and EVA-251 (which hosts Star Strike, Cold War and few other mods).

The result is that this site is loading much faster for everyone and our friends at CNCNZ.com inherited the honour of being the second heaviest cpu user of this server just behind Revora. Since then, we have yet to hear about error 503 happening here and, to be honest, I have no more ideas on how to eliminate this plague from the site, if users still get it.

Anyway, I hope your experience with PPM improves after this change. Our next problem that will be investigated and, hopefully, improved is our captcha system, where some chrome users reported that they are not getting a single chance at all with that. For now, our recommendation is to switch to another browser if your 3 attempts are exhausted.

m7 · Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2012 7:40 pm Post subject:

Oh I hate to do this to you, but I did score a few 503's the following morning of the big move, but it was mainly in the Sound forum opening multiple tabs of songs by Vefbl4.
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Banshee · Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2012 8:33 pm Post subject:

Damn it, man. I don't know what causes it and nobody could figure it out either. What I know is that if I speed up the scripts used by PPM account, the amount of errors reduce. And that's what I did. I hope that the situation has improved.

m7 · Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2012 8:36 pm Post subject:

I'll gladly say the situation has considerably improved for the first part. I reserved my posting in the "Server Issues" thread so I could get more testing time to see if your changes have improved or hurt anything.
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SMIFFGIG · Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 12:06 am Post subject:

new error im getting with forums

phpBB : Critical Error

Could not connect to the database
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Banshee · Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 2:09 am Post subject:

Somebody has restarted mysql service when you were trying to view the forums. Translation: lack of luck, try again in a minute.

Cranium · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Dec 2009 **Location**: USA

What the hell is going on? I keep getting these 2 errors!!!!!!!!

PPM Bullshit.png

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The enemy shall be injected with toxic poison - Venom

Banshee · Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 3:35 am Post subject:

MySQL has crashed, swap usage was 100% and server load was high. Once jnengland killed the orphaned PHP processes that mod_fc_cgi has generated and restarted mysql, things were fixed. But this story may repeat more and more times until cPanel supports the replacement for mod_fc_cgi, which seems to be the PHP FPM. But, apparently, cPanel has no plans to support it. And nobody knows how to activate it manually in this server.

And /forum/install_cat/install.php was deleted eons ago, after categories hierarchy installation. So, it wasn't really supposed to exist. That's why it was not found. I don't kow why did you try to execute that file. It's for the administrator only.

Cranium · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Dec 2009 **Location**: USA

I didnt try to execute that file. When I tried to login in it said it was unable to connect to database, then I hit the refresh button and thats what came up? I dont know how it got there Confused

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The enemy shall be injected with toxic poison - Venom

Banshee · Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 4:12 am Post subject:

That's ok. Anyway, I'm talking to jnengland to understand what's causing these internal errors in the server and what crashed mySQL with 100% swap usage.

This server hosts many sites (like PPM) that have errors and apache floods its error logs with these errors. But, eventually, apache crashes and is restarted. The problem is that the old PHP processes that were managed by apache before it crashes, persists... and they do absolutely nothing than flooding the system with unnecessary code that is executed by cpu and uses RAM. And for some reason, this mod_fc_gid treats them as valid processes. After several crashes, some accounts (starting by PPM's which is the main process spawner of the server) starts to bypass the limits of allowed processes set in mod_fc_gid and the server returns that it is overloaded (error 503).

It seems that the server used to avoid this problem a while ago with a script that cleared orphaned PHP processes everytime apache restarted. But, for some reason, something has disabled it sometime ago and nobody noticed. Now jnengland has enabled again and he has tweaked somethings to speed up the server. Let's prey for it to work.