XF 1.5 503 Errors after server move

GreyWing

Member
I'm a bit baffled to be honest guys. I'm only posting in case anyone has seen this before.

Had a xenforo site working fine on cpanel, using php 7.0. Decided to move to DirectAdmin but the site won't work now in php 7. I'm getting a "503 The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."

Things we have done to try and fix it

We changed things on the server settings but still no luck. We changed the apache handlers, changed and tried php 7.1,
Gone up the upgrades of mysql to Mariadb and still no luck

We changed things on the server settings but still no luck. We uninstalled all the add-ons and still no luck.

We did update the xenforo software to the latest 15.x version and still no luck.

We went back to using php 5.6 on the server and with no changes to the database or files, the forum started working again.

We have installed a fresh install of xenforo on the same server and that works using php7

We swapped the config files about so that the one live site that doesn't work, will work if we connect it to the working database of the new install. And when we gave the new install the old config file to the old database, that failed. I think from that we can rule out any file problems, it seems to be something in our database that we imported that doesn't like php 7.

Not even sure where to go now on this one, has anyone ever seen anything like it before?

Cheers
Graeme
 
What add-ons do you have installed on the installation that doesn't work?

That's about the only thing I can think of, if a new installation works.
 
We had about 10-15 on there but have since uninstalled (not just disabled) all of them and still no joy. At the moment, we are currently running without any addons at all.

Checking templates, and going back to cpanel to see if that fixes it. Very odd.
 
If the add-ons are uninstalled, then I can't think why the site won't load as no additional code will be called.

Anything in the server error log?
 
We continue to get these mate

"
[Fri Feb 09 16:30:40.143710 2018] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 1387:tid 140690984331008] [client 94.174.***.**:59022] AH01067: Failed to read FastCGI header
[Fri Feb 09 16:30:40.143762 2018] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 1387:tid 140690984331008] (104)Connection reset by peer: [client 94.174.***.**:59022] AH01075: Error dispatching request to :"

"

That's what we originally tried to focus on, but when the fresh install of xenforo worked out of the box it left us a bit confused that it might not be that.
 
If you can access admin.php then it's possible (likely) it's related to a table which is only loaded when accessing the front end.

Does the error still happen when trying to access as a guest?
If so, that rules out any moderation related tables, which can sometimes cause issues if there is a lot of moderated content waiting to be dealt with.
 
Yes mate can still access as a guess. Great point. I might start to chop and change tables with the fresh install server then. I'll keep going until one of them makes a difference. The site is on a development server so not under any pressure of downtime.

Would you think that might be the best way of dealing with it?
 
In that case it sounds like it's related to unapproved content - threads or posts waiting approval.

Check the xf_moderation_queue table.
How large is that?
 
I emptied that and no luck unfortunately.

I did just empty the table "xf_permission_cache_content "

that brought the front end of the site back, but without any content and is really slow. Got rid of the 503 error.

Might be unrelated but certainly a small sign of something else maybe
 
It's picked up speed again, but all the posts have gone. I dropped a few tables before that may have caused the posts to disappear. So currently going to a backup of the site I took a few hours ago. Then will drop that table first and see if that helps.
 
We have 8 usergroups, 1 style, and 1 language

The backup just iunstalled, I emptied the table "xf_permission_cache_content " and that brings the front end of the site back but without any content. I can log in to the front end, I can also see the search page, but can't see any categories, can't view members, nor see private messages. These bring back 503 errors.

Trying to perform a search brings back

"Service Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."

I did rebuild all the content tables and caches from the admin section but still no luck unfortunately.
 
ok, so out of all options I downloaded the database from the direct admin site that doesn't work and put it on a cpanel install. It works fine, so all the tables work.

As xenforo works on DirectAdmin (proved with the fresh install), it's now narrowed down to - large xenforo databases don't work on directadmin running php 7. It's a site with a database of over 1.2gb.

I'll update when I get it sorted, just in case anyone else has the same issues but almost certainly looks like it isn't a Xenforo issue.

Thanks for your help guys
 
Not a great result but at least you know now.

It could just mean that PHP 7 needs tweaking/setting up on DirectAdmin.

Cheers mate, got it sorted. It turned out to be that mod_ruid2 was on the server setup and it conflicts work with fast cgi. Whilst Cpanel won't let you build your settings like that in EasyApache4, DirectAdmin will and will still work partially.

Sorted and sorted, phew!

Thanks again
 
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