MODX having a hard time on Rackspace Cloud Sites

halfnium - if I could like your post I would. Its the overall concept and organization the modx that is fantastic. I'd love to see a stable cloud hostable product here. In fact - if I stay with modx in the long run - I'll need to see it. I know they need to figure out a way to make their money to stay afloat. I would never begrudge that. But its all about stability. Revo has yet to be as stable as evo was in my opinion.

I had come back to see if any resolution has been made to this situation. Sadly, it appears it has gone nowhere. I have to say, I was pretty miserable from November to around March or so. No progress whatsoever. Upset clients. No answers. Me having to physically move or rebuild all affected to an entirely new hosting setup. I thought I was passed this mess. The affected sites are in a new location and all the other sites (and there are many) seem to be doing fine.

Until now.

Out of nowhere I have a client who gets a white screen (or 500 error depending on your browser) upon logging in. Clearing cache does not fix this. Running setup again does not fix this. I could really use some advice here on this. If I have to migrate one site I think I will completely lose it. And if I have to migrate a site all because a client is pissed because he can't access his site, well thanks ruining another one of my days!

On which host is your client having the issues?

Quote from: rethrash at Jun 04, 2013, 09:12 AM

On which host is your client having the issues?

RackSpace, of course.

I had already migrated the handfull of our sites that were being affected by "whatever". This one had been doing fine until out of nowhere we started getting the white screen once you logged in.

To be honest, this never really was a problem before. If we got a white screen on login we would just delete the cache and all is good. Not this time.

Another interesting thing (to me at least) is that for each new browser i would try, I would at least get the login screen and then it would go white. But then it just stayed white no matter how often I refreshed. I guess it did log me in....

Rackspace Cloud Sites continues to have issues with MODX (and at CMS Expo, Drupal users reported the same thing). We still hope to gain resolution with them, but it is an issue with file locking and NFS unique to their particular infrastructure. Unfortunately this is out of our ability to code around, which we've tried to do repeatedly without luck.

We've run everything from Wordpress, to Drupal yes, even Joomla (not my choice), Magento, and of course MODx on cloudsites. None of them run well. I don't get it. Evo runs great on it, usually get under 200ms response form server once cached. Revo was never quick on it.. but just got slower and slower.

I'll say it again because the first time is a ways back in the thread. You need to use something like a cloud server, they also offer something called a CloudDatabase, it's like a managed cloud server that only does mysql, We have a 512mb RAM variety running most of our sites, then a few cloud servers as http nodes. Yeah it's a bit more expensive, but think of it as trading 500 errors and white screens for super fast manager interfaces and sub 100ms response times.

Quote from: rethrash at Jun 04, 2013, 08:24 PM

Rackspace Cloud Sites continues to have issues with MODX (and at CMS Expo, Drupal users reported the same thing). We still hope to gain resolution with them, but it is an issue with file locking and NFS unique to their particular infrastructure. Unfortunately this is out of our ability to code around, which we've tried to do repeatedly without luck.

Thanks for the response, Ryan. So there is no way to recover from an inaccessible manager screen if the normal tricks do not work? Otherwise I am looking at moving a multi-context site to a new server. I'm guessing that since I can't access the manager, this will be more of a challenge.

Any guides for someone in this situation? Most require me to have access to the manager.

SpaceCity, when you say you cleared the cache, I assume you mean you deleted the entire contents of .../core/cache by FTP? That ought to have fixed it, if it was indeed the usual cache corruption problem we were having on Rackspace Cloud Sites. So this might be another issue, although I'm not sure what. When you re-ran setup, was that after installing the latest version of MODX?

Anyway, I don't see why you would need access to the manager to move the site, though. I would think you could just move the files, export the database from phpMyAdmin and import it to the new server, install the latest version of MODX over the moved files and run setup. Make sure you change your path settings in config files and in the database, and it should work fine without actually logging in to the old manager. Obviously back everything up first just in case.

Quote from: esnyder at Jun 05, 2013, 02:46 PM

SpaceCity, when you say you cleared the cache, I assume you mean you deleted the entire contents of .../core/cache by FTP? That ought to have fixed it, if it was indeed the usual cache corruption problem we were having on Rackspace Cloud Sites. So this might be another issue, although I'm not sure what. When you re-ran setup, was that after installing the latest version of MODX?

Anyway, I don't see why you would need access to the manager to move the site, though. I would think you could just move the files, export the database from phpMyAdmin and import it to the new server, install the latest version of MODX over the moved files and run setup. Make sure you change your path settings in config files and in the database, and it should work fine without actually logging in to the old manager. Obviously back everything up first just in case.

Yeah, deleting the cache folder normally "fixes" the white screen issues. just not in this case. This came out of nowhere. I had already migrated all of our other sites that were frequently going down. This is actually the first time I've never been able to access the manager. In all of the other cases, it was chunks or snippets that would fail to render.

I was just hoping there was another trick that I was not aware of. I dread migrating another site due to my current workload. Isn't that usually the case for all of us?

Try changing the IP in the DNS to another one. RS automatically chooses for you based on a pool of nodes. Try moving it to a different one. Find ones available by pinging other sites you have on RS Cloudsites and log them.