Server Errors

[William Thomas Jr]

I keep receiving:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

And also:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@ and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

My host responded back with:

Currently there appears to be some self-referencing script, as for around 1 minute 500 requests were made to the server which caused it to overload temporary and hence you got an Internal server error.

Now we can not say for sure what is causing the problem, however from the log we can see there are a lot of requests towards the page:

https://www.christforums.org/forum/c...h-what-do-i-do

The requests are "GET", so maybe the forum has some function to refresh the page however it makes too many requests, again we can not say for sure however it seems that at certain points the application creates a lot of requests for a very short period of time.

So in this case please try testing your forum and try to cause the Internal server error, it should be something connected to the posting however it might be something else as well. If you find what exactly is causing it you could update this ticket or contact the application developer as he should be able to resolve the problem.

If the problem was not apparent in the Last 7 days we will be able to restore the site from our backups as we keep backups 7 days back, just provide us with the date from which should we restore and we will proceed.

Also this may be unrelated, but sometimes a page takes forever to load. I had started another thread on the issue: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...open-initially

In 5.2.4 RC the pages loaded quickly. Then in the final release the problem returned.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,
William

[Mark.B]

It would be useful if they could tell you waht the actual server error is.

That response reads like a lot of hosting responses we see, which is effectively an attempt to blame the software couched in plausible technical terminology.

If there were 500 requests in one minute they should be able to tell you exactly what and where and when, rather than 'a lot of requests were made to this page' and then a random thread.

It's always worth running the two cache clearing queries:

DELETE FROM cache
DELETE FROM cacheevent

[William Thomas Jr]

It would be useful if they could tell you waht the actual server error is.

That response reads like a lot of hosting responses we see, which is effectively an attempt to blame the software couched in plausible technical terminology.

If there were 500 requests in one minute they should be able to tell you exactly what and where and when, rather than 'a lot of requests were made to this page' and then a random thread.

It's always worth running the two cache clearing queries:

DELETE FROM cache
DELETE FROM cacheevent

Thanks Mark. I asked for the actual server errors before writing this post. I was directed towards the raw access logs in Cpanel. I don't see what they are talking about in the logs, but I did notice an overly aggressive MJ12bot which I have now blocked.

I ran the two queries and so far so good.

Thanks,
William

[Wayne Luke]

In your forum root directory is there an error_log file? If so what are the contents of it?

[William Thomas Jr]

In your forum root directory is there an error_log file? If so what are the contents of it?

There are no error logs in my root directory.

William

[Wayne Luke]

Then the errors aren't PHP related. Probably just what the server provider said, the site was overloaded. I didn't see any mechanisms to refresh the page you pointed out. Doesn't mean that someone couldn't have set their browser up to auto-refresh it.

[William Thomas Jr]

I think I see evidence of what my host is claiming. I haven't checked my email for errors in a week. I have thousands and they are all the same. I am receiving hundreds of emails per minute.... at different times throughout the day. It happens in spikes.

Database error in vBulletin 5.2.4:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT * FROM bbcode;

MySQL Error : MySQL server has gone away
Error Number : 2006
Request Date : Saturday, October 1st 2016 @ 09:40:24 AM
Error Date : Saturday, October 1st 2016 @ 09:40:57 AM
Script : http:///forum/bible-prophecy/amillen...-rapture/page4
Referrer :
IP Address : xx.xx.xxx.xx
Username : Guest
Classname : vB_Database_MySQLi
MySQL Version :

And also:

Database error in vBulletin 5.2.4:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT * FROM bbcode;

MySQL Error : MySQL server has gone away
Error Number : 2006
Request Date : Saturday, October 1st 2016 @ 09:40:16 AM
Error Date : Saturday, October 1st 2016 @ 09:40:56 AM
Script : http:///forum/christian-community/ge...h-what-do-i-do
Referrer :
IP Address : xx.xx.xxx.xx
Username : Guest
Classname : vB_Database_MySQLi
MySQL Version :

What do I do? Are those URLS functional? As far as I am aware my site uses https://

Thanks,
William

[Lynne]

"MySQL Server has gone away" is a server issue. See this: https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/...mysql_goneaway and this: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/node/829758 You will need to talk to your host about this in order to get it resolved.

[William Thomas Jr]

"MySQL Server has gone away" is a server issue. See this: https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/...mysql_goneaway and this: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/node/829758 You will need to talk to your host about this in order to get it resolved.

Received this from my host:

The timeout values are still the same as they were set previously by my colleagues.

The messages from that you have received suggest that the application is trying to execute an invalid query: Code:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT * FROM bbcode;

which may result in MySQL timeout errors as the it could not be completed.

In this case, you should consider contacting the support team of vBulletin again and ask them to check the queries that the application is making towards the database.

Of course, if they suggest that any setting on the server needs to be modified, we would gladly do it if possible.

Looking at the URL or Script it is calling a url that is http:///forum how can that be a correct url when my site is https://www.christforums.org/ ?

Thanks
William

[glennrocksvb]

Looking at the URL or Script it is calling a url that is http:///forum how can that be a correct url when my site is https://www.christforums.org/ ?

I'm not sure if that's a bug or that was intentional to remove the domain for security reasons.

[Mark.B]

I'm afraid to say that the responses from the host are typical from a host that is simply running an under-resourced server. They are trying to blame the script (vBulletin). If this was the cause, we'd have thousands of customers all reporting the same issue. We see this issue all the time, it beggars belief that hosts attempt to claim that software with thousands and thousands of customers must be badly coded in such a way that it only affects their servers.

The bottom line is that MySQL Server Has Gone Away is absolutely a server issue, and it's generally due to insufficient resources at the server side.

I've no idea why they think 'SELECT * FROM bbcode;' should be making the server time out. All this does is return any custom BBcodes, on a default forum it won't return anything at all. This just happens to be the query that has triggered the error.

[Replicant]

I don't think Siteground has any under-resourced servers Mark.

[Wayne Luke]

It doesn't have to be your site that is triggering the spike. On a shared server, all websites usually share the same MySQL Server. Think of all the queries from every site on the server as water flowing through a funnel. When the water moves at the proper rate, everything moves nicely. If more water is added, it backs up.

Any site using that MySQL server can cause its resources to spike and cause it to become unresponsive to other queries. This is why the errors happen in Spikes because apps like vBulletin continue to try and run queries but there are no resources to do this. Eventually, if the spike lasts long enough the server will simply refuse new connections. Things calm down and then business renews.

You can ask your host to run a slow query log on your site. This would help identify any trouble spots that can lead to a spike.