Too many 'index.php' processes - '500 Internal Server Error'

Hello,

I have recently been getting '500 Internal Server Error' messages on all of my 1and hosted websites. 1and1 have advised that that the issue is with my OpenCart website, specifically the processes running from the 'index.php' file.

I have had a look at the processes on the server using 'ps aux' (Putty) and there are indeed processes with commands of '/usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 /path/to/index.php'. Each time I refresh there are anything between 1 to around 18 instances of these. It is when there are around 10 or more of there that we start getting the 'Internal Server Error' messages.

Please could somebody advise what might be causing these extra process from 'index.php', and why the number might be fluctuating so much?

The sites have worked normally for months, one thing to mention is that a few days before we noticed the errors I put live a PayPal Pro iframe payment module. Could the iframe be causing additional open processes which should be closing?

Thank you very much for any help,

Mike

Any help on this would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

Update - I have installed a backup on another server and this issue is still occuring.

I have also installed an old backup from before this issue started and it is still occuring (could something external have changed and be causing this?). I've disabled all modules, payment methods and vqmods, and also scripts and anything else calling external files.

I've installed a fresh copy of OC and this is working correctly. This leads me to believe it's something I might've added to the website files, but a while ago before this issue started. I don't think the issue lies with the loading of elements on the page (images, css, scripts, etc) but the wait time before the website receives information back from the server/database.

Any advice at all would be great.

Thanks,

Mike

I don't think a problem really lies with your website, but more of with your server. It seems that your server is overloaded and taking more than it should usually. It's best to migrate to another server if issue persists. A good test you can do is to just upload your same website to another host to give a test.

Thanks very much for your response.

I have installed a backup on a different server (JustHost) and the issue still occurred. This made me think it was not a server issue, but what was being sent from my website to the server. I pointed my backup website to the fresh-install OC database tables, and the issue did not occur anymore. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the fact there are hardly any products/modules being loaded but it looks like it could be something in the database which is the cause.

Thank you for any help.

Mike

I ended up moving the site onto a dedicated server, the website however continued to be slow. I made the top nav and left nav static rather than dynamic and this solved the problem (I had disabled these on the shared server but it didn't work then), the website was lightening quick even after we re-coded the menus with our own dynamic code.

Now it's a few weeks later and the exact same issue has started up again on the dedicated server. We deleted a lot of unused 0-stock products and after a while the issue went away. A few days after that, it has started up again! Could this be linked to the fact that an import was made before the issue started again or could this be coincidence? Imports with a lot more products had been made before this and not caused the issue.

I'm now back to square one and would appreciate any more help you could give.

Thanks,

Mike

how many products and categories do you have? Try turning off category count to help with that. JustHost isn't really a very good web host if I didn't remember wrongly. And should you require professional assistance with this issue, feel free to drop us an email to discuss how we can get it done right

Make sure your images are not large because I was getting same problem on shared hosting when all my images were over 3000px