Site Stalling

[Gerk]

No, all of these stalls are on client side, but initiated from the PHP session_start, so nothing shows up in logs.  I haven't had any more issues but I haven't been on the site a ton.  It does seem much faster now though, so crossing fingers that changing up those last couple of things helped.

[gbm]

it was stalling every day for me for months, kind of expected it each time, but surprisingly has worked every time since yesterday

[napoleonboot]

Stalled several times today

[Gerk]

For those that are seeing stalls, have you cleared you cache and cookies?  I suspect that these stalls are due to things being stuck in cache and still trying to use old sessions or load older versions of pages (and still trying to load song previews).

[Gerk]

And within a minute of me posting that it totally crapped out for me.  I think I found one more thing that was happening and am working on a fix for it.  It's definitely PHP session related.  I found a session directory that had over 1 million files in it, so I think that might be part of the problem.  For the fellow geeks in the crowd it looks like PHP session garbage collection was not working.  For the non-geeks ... something busted, working on it.

[Gerk]

Hmm I think it might be time to look at replacing this forum and software ...

[Gerk]

But please do keep us in the loop if it stalls again.  The hail mary fix seems to be still working for me, but unsure if it's just more whack-a-mole or if it's helped others too.

[usalabs]

Because of the hack you had to use to get v1.1.21 to work with a newer version of PHP, perhaps you could un-hack it, and use PHP 5.3 which is what this version of SMF was built for, unless you're using another PHP script that has to run on a newer version of PHP.

If you're using headless Ubuntu server, there are ways to install and use different versions of PHP, I wrote a bash script that allows me to change Apache-PHP versions as well as the PHP CLI versions, from PHP versions 5.6 to 7.4 inclusive, using a menu driven script, so that if a forum or CMS script complains that it needs a newer version of PHP, then I just run the script, select a new version, then re-run the forum/CMS install script and check it again, and so on, until I get the right PHP version.

Currently I have installed on my Ubuntu server, PHP versions:-

5.6
7.0
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4

And I can change to any one of them using the bash script.

If you want to have a look at the script I can post it on pastebin and post a link here.

[Gerk]

Thanks but that's not going to work, PHP5 is beyond end of life, is unsupported and has some known MASSIVE security issues, which is the primary reason why we had to stop running on the old version.  You don't need to copy and paste this info and continue to post it all over the place.  The shoutbox AND this thread AND private messages are a bit overkill.

[Gerk]

And got a dreaded stall again just a little while ago

There's probably not a lot more we can do here to try and fix this one, stand by as we figure out how to move forward with all of this.

[Gerk]

And got a dreaded stall again just a little while ago

There's probably not a lot more we can do here to try and fix this one, stand by as we figure out how to move forward with all of this.

Playing whack-a-mole.  One more tweak added.  Shaking my head as to why the SMF programmers thought any of the heavy handed stuff they were doing would be a good thing ...

[Gerk]

Has anyone had any more freezes in the last week?  I haven't had any ... and probably just jinxed it ...

[napoleonboot]

I get one every couple of minutes I am on the site. I cleared my browser cache when you said a few days ago.

[Gerk]

Hmm ... I did totally jinx it as well because I got one literally two clicks after this post.

[gbm]

always stalls after successfully downloading an .mp3 or .wav etc..