I’ve recently transferred a static site into MODx Revolution. The client is generally very happy, but there seems to be an issue partially related to MODx.
Every now and then (its hard to pinpoint exactly when) the home page of the site will just appear blank. There’s no code being loaded, but the MODx manager, and the rest of the pages still work fine.
The only different between the home page, and the rest of the pages is that they use a different template. I’ve gone through both templates, but can’t see anything that would be causing this problem.
The strange thing is, if I see that its down, then log into MODx Manager, open a page, or template, or chunk, make a small change then save it, the homepage is back up immediately!! Its very strange. It tends to stay up for a little while, then goes back down again.
There is nothing too strange in my homepage. Meta tags, links to CSS files and JS files, some conditional CSS IE files, a custom countdown PHP script thats being brought in with a snippet (which is the most likely to be the culprit in my opinion but thats in the other pages too, which don’t have an issue), small FormIt form, links to a twitter profile and Facebook profile and Google Analytics). No strange MODx tags - just an uncached site_url, site_name, modx_charset, description and longtitle.
If anybody has any ideas what might be causing this, please, please let me know.
MODx Revolution 2.0.7pl
IIS 6
MySQL 5.0.51a
PHP Version 5.2.13
PDO Driver for MySQL
client library version 5.0.51a
Browsing with Firefox 3.6.13.
Blank page usually means a code error.
Are there any snippets on the page that might rely on data that is intermittent available?
IE: RSS feeds etc that might be failing.
It’s a snippet....i’ll bet. Anything in the manager error logs?
@stratton - I’ve just remembered that this site is on a different host to ours. I’m not sure of the specs buts the host is 1&1 (and the setup was a right pain to sort out). This could be related, but then as you say, odd how it only affects the home page.
@jusmeig - This was my first thought. There were two .js scripts that were being called but not used, one for blogger and one for twitter. I’ve removed them, and fingers crossed the site has remained live for a few hours! Its just strange how I could go into the manager, re-save a resource, and the homepage would start working again! Very odd.
Thanks for the suggestions, if it goes down again I’ll come back with more details relating to the host, and the code thats on the home page.
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I would be willing to guess it’s a hosting related issue. I’ve had more than my fair share of issues with 1&1 servers trying to run MODx (Evo/Revo).
It sounds like you might be hitting a php memory limit or something with them, so you may want to look into a different hosting provider in the mean time.
Quote from: neilp123 at Feb 11, 2011, 10:36 AM
@stratton - I’ve just remembered that this site is on a different host to ours. I’m not sure of the specs buts the host is 1&1 (and the setup was a right pain to sort out). This could be related, but then as you say, odd how it only affects the home page.
@jusmeig - This was my first thought. There were two .js scripts that were being called but not used, one for blogger and one for twitter. I’ve removed them, and fingers crossed the site has remained live for a few hours! Its just strange how I could go into the manager, re-save a resource, and the homepage would start working again! Very odd.
Thanks for the suggestions, if it goes down again I’ll come back with more details relating to the host, and the code thats on the home page.
Saving a resource clears the cache. If there’s corrupt code in the cache, that would fix things until the next time the cache gets messed up.
I see this often with the Revo clear-cache console in the Manager. If there’s a corrupted file in the cache, the console comes up blank until I manually clear the cache, then it’s fine.
If it happens again, it might be worth going through the core/cache directory file-by-file and looking for a file that ends abruptly (IOW, got truncated). That might give you a clue where the problem is coming from.
