Cart crashes server App Pool

[kazbryan]

Hi guys,

I've created a Zen Cart site for a client, who is now in the testing and uploading phase. Everything has been running fine locally, but now that the site is on their live server (with Fasthosts) and they're adding large amounts of data, they're getting problems that every so often the server App Pool crashes and PHP is no longer available.

I've gone through a few things with them, and made sure that they're logging out correctly, but so far haven't been able to find out what exactly causes the issue - it seems to just be after they've done a certain amount of work on the catalogue. So my only thoughts now are that somewhere in the modules I've added there's some code that's not closing a connection properly, or something similar. I've contacted the hosts, and they are pretty sure there's something in the site that is causing the problem, but despite the error logs being available we can't seem to find a single identifiable point at which the site goes down.

Has anyone else had this experience, and can anyone suggest where I should start the search for a code leak?

The site uses v1.3.9h with the following modules:

• Additional Product Images
• CAPTCHA
• Column Layout Grid
• xsell
• fckeditor
• Facebook sidebox
• Google analytics
• Zen lightbox

I'd appreciate any help and suggestions, I'm at my wits end at the moment!

Thanks in advance!

[kuroi]

Is this a dedicated Windows VPS? The error you're experiencing is specific to Windows servers. Have you considered switching them to a Linux VPS for which you'll find much greater support in this forum?

[kazbryan]

Sorry, I forgot to say! It's on a Linux server - just as it is on my internal dev server.

[kuroi]

OK. But application pools are an IIS construct. Are you sure that the remote server is running Linux?

[kazbryan]

Oh, well that's interesting. I set up the hosting as Linux, but it was Fasthosts who told me that they'd need to reset the App pool... As I'm more familiar with IIS than Linux I didn't query it. I've just run a netcraft server report and it's confirmed that the site is on Linux, with Apache 2.2.3 (CentOS)

[kuroi]

Is this a shared server, a VPS or a dedicated server?

However, it sounds to me like the site is falling foul of some part of Fasthosts own infrastrure - possibly this is a Linux VPS where the space is allocated via a windows app - but that's a guess in an area where I'm far from being expert.

What Ic an say is that I've seen some huge, really huge Zen Cart's running without problem on Linux servers. There's little if anything in Zen Cart that limits site size before the server limitations themselves kick in.

[kazbryan]

It's a shared Linux server. Have never had this sort of problem before with anything on their servers, so I've been stumped on this one - seems that they are too!

[kuroi]

Is this statement that the server app pool crashes coming from them, or based on something you've seen?

Also, I'd be worried that PHP is becoming unavailable. PHP may throw a fatal error in response to a script becoming unavailable, but that should only terminate that script's execution. PHP itself becoming unavailable due to something done in an application really shouldn't happen, especially on a shared server.

When I last looked at Fasthosts the only way to achieve SSL on their shared servers was via their secured vault facility. This required having a second copy of the site in a limited space. So limited indeed, that we concluded that even ignoring the hassle of keeping two versions of the code in sync, it could only support small sites before the available secure space was exceeded.

To cut a long story short, at Kuroi there are hosts upon whose shared servers we refuse to work, because we know that we're risking a whole heap of problems unrelated to actually developing sites. Fasthosts is on that list.