General MODx (Revolution) Insight

Glad to help. Yeah, in my experience it’s always easier to troubleshoot a dedicated box. The cloud, for all of it’s supposed advantages, never seems to work as advertised and troubleshooting problems takes twice as long. I get messages from Media Temple about grids going down "for maintenance" at least a couple times a month whereas my dedicated box has been up and running for years.

Those health-check test pages are real life-savers. I remember one client who simply did not listen to what were the necessary server requirements -- for one, we specified the versions of PHP and MySQL, and we specifically said that the application could not be deployed on load balanced servers (due to $_SESSION handling). They kept flaming us in meetings and blaming the app UNTIL we wrote a health-check page that ran on EVERY page request -- it would verbosely fail and print out every known problem with the environment. Only then did they actually start listening to us and taking steps to do what we had asked for from the beginning: deploy the app on a single box, free from load-balancing. Sometimes I think that single test page was the best damn piece of code I ever wrote because it made it plain for everyone involved where the problems were.