Established working site - new problem

Hi,

My retail site (link in my sig below) has been working fine for years. It was updated to v1.3.9h a couple of years ago. I last poked around checking links and things about 5 weeks ago. I haven't made any changes to the site since then.

Yesterday when I poked again, I started to get the dreaded "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading" error. (The wording is different in different browsers. This was in Firefox.) The error occurs when clicking the "Artists..." category, far right on the header menu, and when clicking either of bannerThree or bannerFour, the two pics above the footer. As well, if you go to the sitemap from the footer link, the "Artists..." link and all the artists below that give the error. All other links work fine throughout the site, AFAIK.

All of those pages are there on the site (that is, ZC can generate them as needed) and can be reached in other ways. For example, if you click another category link, say "Landscapes", and then click on an artist's name in the product listing, you go to that artist's full product listing just fine.

Can anyone suggest where to go from here? Is there a way to debug this to see what's going on?

Thanks,

Rob

All of those pages are there on the site (that is, ZC can generate them as needed) and can be reached in other ways. For example, if you click another category link, say "Landscapes", and then click on an artist's name in the product listing, you go to that artist's full product listing just fine.
This isn't a fix, but might help: the artist link in Landscapes is going to the manufacturer listing (index filter) whereas the Artists section is made up of categories and sub categories (at least it looks that way using google's cache).

How many Products are in the Artists category, categories_id 80 ...

Do you have Categories mixed in with the Products in categories_id 80?

Do these use this Category as their master_categories_id ...

Does anything change if you switch to the Classic template ... does the Artists category, categories_id 80 work?

All excellent questions!

Ajeh:

How many Products are in the Artists category, categories_id 80 ...
Zero products, 30 sub-categories, two of which are disabled. In all the sub-cats there are 273 products, some of which are disabled. (Greeting cards go in and out of stock.)

Ajeh:

Do you have Categories mixed in with the Products in categories_id 80?
Nope, just sub-cats.

Ajeh:

Do these use this Category as their master_categories_id ...
I checked a few of the products under the sub-cats, and they (all that I checked) use other categories as their master category, such as Landscape or Holiday, or whatever. Is there a quick way to tell without going into each product?

Ajeh:

Does anything change if you switch to the Classic template ... does the Artists category, categories_id 80 work?
Unfortunately the problem persists in the Classic Template.

It's important to note that no product changes occurred in the time period since the site was working fine, except that I disabled one or two products as they ran out of stock - which is a normal occurance. I do that simply by clicking the green button in the admin sub-cat product list, turning it red.

Rob

Could you give some of the active categories_id in the Artists categories_id 80 and say how many Products are in the categories_id ...

The artist category IDs go from 81 up to 111, skipping 101 for reasons not remembered. Try http://www.artcardshop DOT com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=82 for example. In that category 82 there are 10 cards, 8 active, 2 disabled.

Interestingly, that link works, but the link in the sitemap, which is http://www.artcardshop DOT com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=80_82 does not work. So it's category ID80 which is indeed the problem.

Rob

Okay ... it's time to play the bazillion questions game ... :P

Go to phpMyAdmin and check the two tables:
categories
categories_description

for categories_id 80 ...

In the table:
categories

is there just the 1 record?

what do you see in the records for it?

In the table:
categories_description

is there just 1 record?

what do you see in the records for it?

Check the table:
products_to_categories

search for the categories_id 80 ... do you find any records? (you shouldn't)

Go back to the table:
categories

search for the categories_id 83 what is the parent_id ...
search for the categories_id 91 what is the parent_id ...
search for the categories_id 107 what is the parent_id ...

You know all the best questions...

Ajeh:

Go to phpMyAdmin and check the two tables:
categories
categories_description
for categories_id 80 ...
In the table:
categories
is there just the 1 record?
what do you see in the records for it?
Just one.
categories_id categories_image parent_id sort_order date_added last_modified categories_status
80 NULL 0 10 2007-02-25 18:17:13 2007-03-29 21:44:31 1

Ajeh:

In the table:
categories_description
is there just 1 record?
what do you see in the records for it?
Just one.
categories_id language_id categories_name
80 1 <b>Artists...</b>

Ajeh:

Check the table:
products_to_categories
search for the categories_id 80 ... do you find any records? (you shouldn't)
None for 80.

Ajeh:

Go back to the table:
categories
search for the categories_id 83 what is the parent_id ...
search for the categories_id 91 what is the parent_id ...
search for the categories_id 107 what is the parent_id ...
The parent_id is 80 for all the categories from 81 to 111.

Rob

You were suppose to come back with junk or missing records ... not things that look correct ... :lookaroun

Gonna have to give this some more thought ... it has me perplexed at the moment ... :lamo:

Are they all products_type=1, or are they mixed?
What happens if you disable a bunch of them, perhaps all of them, and then progressively re-enable them one by one until the problem manifests again?

Ajeh:

You were suppose to come back with junk or missing records ... not things that look correct ... :lookaroun
What can I say? Zen Cart makes it easy to do good work. :laugh:

DrByte:

Are they all products_type=1, or are they mixed?
What happens if you disable a bunch of them, perhaps all of them, and then progressively re-enable them one by one until the problem manifests again?
All the products are products_type=1 - no exceptions.

It's getting too late for my poor brain to try disabling them in batches. I'll try that tomorrow. In fact, I will look up which cards (just a couple I think) have been disabled in the past month or so, and I'll re-enable them first just to see what happens.

Rob

DrByte:

What happens if you disable a bunch of them, perhaps all of them, and then progressively re-enable them one by one until the problem manifests again?

Since disabling a couple of products is the only change that occurred on the site in the past few months, I went in and re-enabled all disabled products, several at a time, checking each time, the re-disabling them and continuing on to the next batch. No change in site behaviour throughout it all.

I will now try disabling all but one category... Wish me luck!
...
...
Okay, now it gets interesting.

I disabled the artists category and the others all worked, but they had been working anyway. So I enabled it and disabled all of the others. Artists... now worked. So I started re-enabling the categories one by one. I got 7 others enabled, then when I added an 8th category, Artists... stopped working again. Disabled that one and tried another... same result. In fact I couldn't add any of the remaining 4 categories without causing Artists... to stop working.

So for some reason, my ZC installation can no longer handle that many categories and products, even though compared to other sites the number of categories and products is very small.

Note that the site has been running with this many categories and products for years, and in its current template for over a year, with no problem.

Where to from here?

Rob

Maybe it's blowing out RAM in the server's current configuration? Did the host upgrade the PHP version recently and mistakenly downgrade the memory settings?

Any errors being logged? http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?124-blank-page

DrByte:

Maybe it's blowing out RAM in the server's current configuration? Did the host upgrade the PHP version recently and mistakenly downgrade the memory settings?
PHP version (and all other server details) hasn't changed in the past year. I do sometimes get close to my VPS's RAM limits, but only when I'm messing around in the admin a lot - like today. I got an automated message a few hours ago telling me I was getting close yesterday, for example. But the ordinary operation of the site never gets close to that limit. Usually my sites use only a small fraction of the allocated resources.

DrByte:

Any errors being logged? http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?124-blank-page

I just set the cache folder to writable (557 okay?) and will see what happens later today.

Rob

DrByte:

Any errors being logged? http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?124-blank-page

None. I belatedly realized the cache folder has always been writable, and there's nothing in it but an htaccess file and a placeholder index.html file.

Rob

I can't seem to trigger the symptoms you described in your earlier posts.

This KB article suggests that the error could be caused by the content on the page triggering adblockers and other tools you've installed on your computer: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Error_loading_any_website (2 mentions)
Posters of other articles say that after they cleaned up the presence of spyware on their computers, the "connection was reset" problem went away.

I go to your site and it appears to be working now with the 28 categories working ...

Are you still having issues? :unsure:

I've left a couple of categories disabled so that it will work properly. Just checked again, and if I re-enable either of the disabled cats, the problem comes back.

In testing, I switched around the cats a bit, disabling this one while enabling that one, reversing that, and then trying a couple of others. So as far as I can tell, it isn't any one category that causes the issue, it's the number of categories. (I'm speaking of the categories across the top navigation menu. The individual artist categories are all sub-cats of the Artists... category, and all but two of them are on, as usual.)

This KB article suggests that the error could be caused by the content on the page triggering adblockers and other tools you've installed on your computer: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Error_loading_any_website (2 mentions)
Posters of other articles say that after they cleaned up the presence of spyware on their computers, the "connection was reset" problem went away.

I use a Mac, which means it's extremely unlikely I have any spyware on my local machine. I don't knowingly run adblockers, though I do have pop-ups disabled on some of my browsers. Also, that article is particularly in reference to Firefox and Mozilla-based browsers. The problem persists in any browser I point at the site. It also is talking about all sites not working. All other sites work fine for me. In short, it's not a local-to-me problem.

I'm concluding there is something wrong at the server so I'm initiating contact with them about it. For example, error logs I can access through my CP show piles of this error...
[Thu Jul 26 13:15:03 2012] [notice] child pid 6136 exit signal Bus error (7)
... which based on the little I can understand of on-line Apache discussions, does indicate a server problem. If that turns out to be the case, they'll fix it toot sweet; they're a good company.

Rob

Thank you Linda and Doc for your efforts.

I contacted my server people about the errors I found in the log files and they upgraded my CentOS5. The site is back to normal operation. There is not, of course, any explanation as to why it had suddenly stopped working after a year of operating properly. [sigh]

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Rob

lol - gotta love server gremlins!