When I try to publish my site, I get this:
Error 500 - Internal server error
An internal server error has occured!
Please try again later.
This started suddenly yesterday. I didn't do anything to precipitate an error.
Any ideas?
Reported on Movable Type 4.1x
Can you get copies of your web server's error logs? If you don't know where to get them, then your host's technical support should be able to get them. Without that data, diagnosing the cause of a HTTP 500 error message is basically impossible.
After further experimenting, when I remove the Google Commerce ads the site seems to publish fine. When I added them back, I got the same error.
The 1and1 control has a CGI output tool to check for server error 500. Using that, here's what came out:
Result:
+ CGI Check succeeded
Status: 200
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Sign in | Movable Type Open Source
Sign inUsername
Password
Remember me?
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type="submit"
accesskey="s"
title="Sign In (s)"
class="primary-button"
>Sign In
STDOUT OK STDERR OK
Client
Engine gecko
Version 1.9
Platform win
System winxp
Color 32
Width 1280
Height 1024
Flash 10
All
Request-Complete 4458ms
Server
Server-Complete 2701ms (61%)
HTML
HTML-Complete 1757ms (39%)
HTML-Details
HTML-Head 1405ms (32%)
Page-Head 1ms (0%)
Page-Body 41ms (1%)
Post-Exec 116ms (3%)
The pasted code doesn't look right. Here's a direct link to a text file with it.
http://www.virtualbeggar.us/pics/error.txt
It's back to not publishing, so forget about removing the Google commerce ads.
Could it be because I use html or Javascript in my Widgets?
That's not a error log output. Your host should be able to give that to you. If you can't find it on one of their control panel pages, I'd suggest submitting a trouble ticket to find it. The real error log should have an entry saying "HTTP 500" for the MT URL for publishing content. What you linked to there, is just the output for the login screen.
In the mean time, have you considered experimenting with an upgrade to MT 4.21?
Hi.
I can easily say I have the same issue and that is totally new for me as well.
As far as the server logs it only indicate that the execution of rebuild, deleting entries or comments, creating new entries or adding comments seemed to loop itself somehow or other.
It could be because my webhost changed all the servers from FreeBsD to Linux servers with Apache 2.
I can publish after many days of intense headaches by removing the code for category pagination. But that itself creates issues as I need the pagination.
have you re-run your mt-check.cgi? Just in case a module is missing on the new set up.
The move from FreeBSD to Linux shouldn't have anything to do with that since what Movable Type uses to run are higher level components like Perl, MySQL and Apache which run equally well on both platforms.
I'd recommend following Richard Benson's suggestion, but also going to your error logs immediately after you get a 500 error and posting the results here so we can help you.
Hello,
The site publishes on its own. Sometimes a day after a post; sometimes 3 days. Basically, I create a post and it appears after 1-3 days. When I try to publish manually is when I get the error 500.
I ran the mt-check.cgi and the error check was successful.
This may be of interest to you. It's Byrne Reese's "Publish Queue Manager." From the sounds of it, you may have background publishing turned on, and this plugin should be able to help you look inside the guts of Movable Type and see if you have any automated publishing processes set up. That's the most likely explanation for why this is happening.
By the way, what hosting service do you use? The host can really make the difference on issues like this. A lot of them are fly-by-night operations. If you and Carina can't get your problems resolved at your current hosts, I highly recommend Hosting Matters. I've used them for a long time now, and they were Instapundit's (among others) host until recently when PajamasMedia took it over for him. I can vouch for them as a solid hosting service for Movable Type with a great environment for hosting such software.
We are using 1and1. They are currently 'looking' into it so we'll wait and see what they come up with.
Any resolution from them yet? As a side note, you're not the only user reporting some major problems with 1and1 right now if that's any consolation.
As of today, no reply. Going to call them.
We just started to get a 500 error as well randomly at 1and1 on our dedicated server with 4.12 - any responses from them? Odd that it just started - seems like a timeout error to me or something else has changed. I have to say we've only got 3 blogs on the box and we've often had issues with MT there. We also had to reduce the number of entries per rebuild to 10 in the past because of 500 errors and never tracked it down.
As I mentioned above, it seems like 1and1 is having problems in general. The two of you might want to backup your databases and asset files.
I finally got a reply from 1an1:
Thank you for contacting us.
I received a case regarding 500 errors when performing tasks at http://mrshappyhousewife.com. The application is
exceeding the resource limits that we impose for your shared hosting package. I've even tried upping the resource quota of your package and that did not make a difference. Here are the limits for your reference:
Programming Limits:
CPU : 6 seconds @ 100%
Memory : 10240KB (10MB)
Numerical Processes : 12
You may find that your application/scripts will work sometimes. These are times when there are enough free resources available (more than the normal) at a
particular time to accommodate your scripts beyond those limits. The solution would be to get a (dedicated) managed server, if it is an option for you, wherein you would have all the resources of the server at your disposal with no quotas imposed.
Experiment with upgrading to MT 4.2. 4.2 has a lot of performance-related upgrades such as template module caching which will dramatically increase the performance of rebuilds. I went from about 30-35 minutes to rebuild my blog down to about 8-9 minutes on average because I make really heavy use of module caching.
Another thing that could be causing this is that we still have the old site running. It was kept up for archival purposes. It is running mambo. We're going to migrate the data over and shut it down.
How popular are these websites you are running?
Hello (this Mr. Happyhousewife, I'm trying to get her going),
Well, I spoken to 1and1 and I've asked them to identify which script is causing the high CPU usage. From what I read, earlier versions of MType had high CPU usage issues. Specially the mt-comments script. She does get a lot of junk messages that build up. In the dashboard, I changed the number of comments displayed from 25 to 200 and now I cant get back to it(I get the server 500 when I try to display the comments).
The Mambo site was taken offline using its backend (it still exists just offline).
The new Mtype upgrade is a security fix so it doesn't affect performance.
Are there any performance scripts or plugins that can help determine where the high usage is coming from?
4.2 is not just a security update, it's a performance upgrade to 4.1. It can actually be a big performance upgrade too. The performance boosts include both the CMS and the rebuild process. I would suggest that you upgrade (backup first, etc.) to it, enable template module caching and start caching some of your more common modules. Here are some good ones:
1) Footer
2) HTML Head
3) Most of your sidebar widgets that don't display page-specific information, such as any archive listing widgets, your creative commons widget and stuff like that.
I'm pretty sure that it's included with 4.2, but you should make sure that you have TypePad Anti-Spam installed on your server once you upgrade. It's very good at catching comment spam before it can cause too much of a performance issue by preventing it from triggering a rebuild.
The CMS is a bit snappier in 4.2 for me, but here's some stats for you to show you what I mean about how much of a performance gain you can get from 4.2's module caching:
My blog stats:
-1,600 entries with about 5,500 some comments
-30-50 pages
-Several additional index templates ranging from a sitemap, to index templates for folders managed by MT.
Rebuild on 4.1: 30-35 minutes
Rebuild on 4.2: 7-10 minutes on average.
I'll try to upgrade then. What is the best way to do it? I tried the internal backup option with Mtype but it just sits there? Make a backup of the SQL database? I downloaded a copy of the entire directory to my local machine. Should I just extract the new version over the old one?
What I do is I make a SQL dump with phpMyAdmin or mysqldump, then log in via SSH and download MT directly from mt.org using the Unix wget command. It's a pretty painless process:
1) Log in to 1and1's server for your account via SSH (all good hosts provide this option, even Dreamhost...)
2) run wget, passing it the full URL to MT open source's latest zip file or gzipped archive.
3) With zip, just run "`unzip MT-4.2*zip`" for the gz file, run "`tar -zxvf MT-4.2*gz`"
4) cd into that MT-4.2 directory.
5) `cp -Rv * /path/to/movable/type` (for me it's `cp -Rv * /home/mike/public_html/mt/`)
Works like a charm. Faster and more reliable than FTP any day of the week!
I created a new directory for the new version of MT. Do I just start a new MT install with MT? or should I overwrite the current mt install?
Should I overwrite the old version or do a fresh install?
Already dumped the sql database and downloaded a copy of the original website.
Back up your existing files, then copy the new 4.2 files over your existing installation.
odd, I overwrote the current install and I'm getting an internal server error when I try to pull up the back end. The site is still 'up'. Something is really screwed up.
I figured it out, I had redo the permissions on the files.
That appears to have fixed the problem. The website appears to be functioning again. Thanks for everything. Mrs. Happyhousewife will be happy!
Glad to see this is getting fixed for you. Keep an eye on the amount of times you get 500 errors from server overloads. That can be a sign of your host packing too many users onto a single shared host, and if it remains a problem, you might want to explore other options including getting them to host your own server.
Hi Mike T. I'm having the EXACT issue described here on one of my client blogs (sadly, also hosted on 1and1). I've turned off all plug-ins, and while a new entry is appearing after being posted, we're getting the same 500 load error that Mrs. Happy Housewife was getting.
The whole site is statically built except I think one template. I've cached a few modules, but the error 500 persists.
We're running MTOS 4.261, and otherwise everything is working fine. Can you (anyone?) suggest ways to reduce the load during publishing? I've not figured out how to set a cron job on 1and1, so Publish Queue may not be an option (I'm pretty ignorant on setting up cron jobs).
Thanks!
As someone who has suffered trying to install 5.03 on 1&1 for two days-- using the 1&1 cgi script checker will not work. If you look at the result you can see it is returning the login page, since this goofy application cannot see any cookies or anything to tell it you are logged in. I can log in fine, only if I try to edit a page I get the 500 error. I do like the tip to look at the server logs, that will help. Also, what's painless for MikeT looks pretty miserable to me.
Try re-uploading the files with passive ftp.