Host reporting too many concurrent processes

Sorry if there’s a similar thread but I couldn’t see it.
My host suddenly took one of my five MODx sites, http://crick.northants.sch.uk, offline claiming too many concurrent processes.
The site gets about 4000 visits per day and has a lot of Flash activities on it and uses 60 Gb bandwith per month.
They say the index.php page is generating the problem and it must be leaving processes open.
They claim it’s the equivalent of thousands of hits per minute.
The site runs v9.22 with the standard snippets.
I’ve disabled stats, a Jot guestbook that was getting a lot of spam and changed to 5 in index.php
Will upgrading to v9.5 help?
Or does anyone else have any suggestions other than going to a dedicated server?
Cheers
David


MODx 0.9.2.2 (rev 1923)
SNIPPETS: Drop Menu, Jot, Maxi Gallery, News Listing, File Upload

Perl
5.008005
MySQL
5.0.26
ASP
4.0.2L
PHP
4.4.4 (5 is available if I add a line to my .htaccess file)

Definitely upgrade as countless bugs have been fixed since 0.9.2, but honestly, I fail to see how anything except the content of your site (or the built-in statistics before 0.9.5) could be responsible for this. And yes, index.php is the problem because every MODx page is rendered using it. But this is likely a problem with rewrite rules conflicting, a missing error page, an unpublished unauthorized page, or some other not so obvious component or configuration. You do have the latest FileDownload snippet with the security corrections, right?

Thanks for the advice Jason.
I have only just turned off the stats feature.
The .htaccess file has only the standard rewrite rules.
I haven’t updated to FileDownload 2.5 yet but will over the weekend.
Do have a valid 404 page specified.
I looked in the error logs and get lots of these (3500 on one day! about the same number of visits!?)

I don’t know where they come from and the host company aren’t helping much!
Will try a v9.5 upgrade to a test site and if O.K. will do the same for the "problem" site
Thanks again
David

Quote from: bunk58 at Feb 24, 2007, 11:12 AM

Thanks for the advice Jason.
I have only just turned off the stats feature.
The .htaccess file has only the standard rewrite rules.
I haven’t updated to FileDownload 2.5 yet but will over the weekend.
Do have a valid 404 page specified.
I looked in the error logs and get lots of these (3500 on one day! about the same number of visits!?)

[Mon Jan 15 06:01:08 2007] [warn] Cannot get media type from 'cgi-script'

I don’t know where they come from and the host company aren’t helping much!
Will try a v9.5 upgrade to a test site and if O.K. will do the same for the "problem" site
Thanks again
David

Actually, FileDownload is critical. If you have an older version in place, it is highly possible that hackers have stolen your database credentials from your config.inc.php file and this may be related to the error log issues; you should update it immediately as indicated in the related Security Announcement.

I get those all the time on several sites in different hosting configurations. Nobody seems to know what they are. It’s nothing to do with being hacked, though.

Actually, this appears to be an issue with the mime-type configurations in Apache. Not sure if you are running Apache 2 with PHP under FastCGI, but the error itself is indicative of some type of issue regarding how PHP files are handled by Apache. And it may be as simple as a misconfiguration in Apache, e.g. adding it as a ScriptAlias rather than an Alias which could explain why it thinks this PHP file is a ’cgi-script’. In any case, see if this link helps, Google a little, and start a dialog with your hosting provider about the issue.

http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/04/apache2-fastcgi/

Interesting. Yes; it seems that HeartInternet, a really big hosting provider/reseller in the UK, has a problem with this.

Hi Susan/Jason,
Thought I replied last night but it doesn’t seem to be here!
I’ve checked the logs on several other non MODx sites and they all show the same error.
Seems to be per hit, regardless of site coding, ie. happens on non PHP pages as well.
I’ll raise a ticket with Heart Internet and forward them the link Jason provided.
I would think having a warning being logged for every visit or even page load would load the servers rather heavily.
You would hope that they’d check the error logs randomly to ensure their setup was O.K.
I’m now in the process of carrying out all the required upgrades and have subscribed to the security updates (better late than never).
Regards
David