500 error?

[mixedgas]

why did i GET:
sEVERAL TIMES TODAY...


HOLYCRAP:500'D!

Server played Russian roulette with a rocket launcher.

I will pretend this is your fault.

dispatch.cgi == Culprit.

sTEVE

[buffo]

I've hit that one a couple times in the past. Basically a time-out on the SQL server. Too many people hitting it at once. Just hit refresh on your browser and you'll be fine.

Adam

[QUAZAR]

I've had that a couple of times. Much better than the usual server overload messages.

[Admin]

Believe it or not... this is not related to the sql server taking a nap. That has its own special error.

This is a memory alloc issue that happens when a number of "processes"(php scripts) hook into my custom dispatch.cgi file to talk to mysql.

Every time someone presses a button other than a keystroke here the system has to allocate memory to handle/process/hand-off the data... be it a post/pm etc.

*sometimes* the destruction of the allocated memory after completion takes too long and leads to an overabundance of memory use from the hundreds of running threads.

When you see Mr.HolyCrap:500'd! it means that memory space was exhausted and needs to be flushed, fast.

The odd part about this error is that its wholly unrelated to system memory, it has something *spooky* to do with how the PHP libraries handle the memory.

Some nonsense about "virtual block spaces".

Anywho. I tweak the values server side every so often to balance the scales and keep this problem under control.

[allthatwhichis]

HOLYCRAP:500'D!

Server played Russian roulette with a rocket launcher.

I will pretend this is your fault.

dispatch.fcgi == Culprit.

I have gotten several of these today. You busy back there?

[DZ]

I have gotten several of these today. You busy back there?

Someone hasn't been hitting the "Donte?" button enough.

[allthatwhichis]

Someone hasn't been hitting the "Donte?" button enough.

[Admin]

It has nothing to do with the donate button. It's all the way to the right and not colored because after the recent donations PL is taken care of for a little over 6 months.

I have a lot of "maintenance" scripts running in the background to keep this place clean... You will notice that these weirdo 500 errors usually happen a couple minutes after the top of the hour... Well, thats when the "big clean" happens, every hour. Blows out cache/temp files and purges the dead mysql connections. *Sometimes* theres a lot of junk to clean and the handoff to/from dispatch.fcgi can hang.

My options to *really* fix this problem are double the server resources which by proxy doubles the cost or break the maint scripts into even smaller sections and queue them up back to back on a 5 minute timer.

I've been working on the latter for obvious reasons.

Theres still a lot of crap I have to do in the background that I have been neglecting recently. So I'm going to go get to that.