Internal Server Error 500 upon sent to all members

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 127

HTML Newsletter has worked very well for sending the newsletter to all my members approx 1400 for years now. Normally when I send I get time out and blank page after 30 seconds, but the sending of the newsletter is completed to all members. But this time no time out occured, but after 5-6 minutes an Internal Server Error 500 happened, which stopped sending the newsletter after 450 members.

When I send the newsletter to 208 prescribers it works, but no timeout occurs as before, but a message that the newsletter has been sent to 206 members.

I have contacted the support of the webhotel that could not find anything wrong in their configuration and they suggested that I put error reporting on and send again.

However, I dont want to send the newsletter 4 times in a short period and in addition with PHP 5.3.3 the site would be littered with error messages.

Merry Christmas All!

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 383

500 is an internal server error. What is causing the error however will be difficult to pin down with error reporting and mysql logging turned on.
It could be a simple thing like your host reducing the number of allowed mysql queries or simply PHP timing out due to a physical execution timeout in the php.ini or the server having too many accounts on it and crashing due to running out of memory.

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 127

Thanks! It is a budget webhotel with many accounts on each server. The first quarter next year they will upgrade the servers, so that they will become 7 times faster. Maybe this will improve things. I also made the last sending 2 am, so the load of the servers would be minimal, but the result was identical - Internal Server Error 500.

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 383

Upgrading their servers is not going to help them much if they have over sold accounts, the only way to resolve that particular problem is to use more servers but by the sounds of things, you are probably getting the error due to the server actually crashing.

Can you PM me the website url or IP address? I might be able ascertain how many accounts they have on the server and/or see if there are any network issues.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

You could try putting the HNL into debug mode which will not actually send. If it is a MySQL constraint, you may still see it fail at roughly the same point. If it makes it much further (because it doesn't actually do the send so less processing), then it is something else.

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 127

Thanks! Normally I have it in DEBUG mode, but I also tried VERBOSE mode. VERBOSE mode did not send any newsletter to all, but only produced SQL code, but it did not send any newsletter and thus did not trigger any Internal Server Error 500, as it completed its action directly and did not send for 5-6 minutes. BTW, for sending the newsletter I did not use SMTP but the other mail option.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

Well, VERBOSE does everything up to the send and just does not send. I was trying to rule out everything else but the send. So, it does comes down to PHP time-out or possibly email throttling by your host that maybe they are not fessing up to?

If you want to test out the time-out theory, try adding a short PHP sleep function also right before the send (and leave it in VERBOSE mode so you're not resending to all your users!) to simulate the delay in each send to see if its PHP time-out. If that doesn't cause the 500 error than I suspect it is some kind of email throttling rules on the host end.

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 127

The strange thing as this problem occurs for the first time, when the site sometimes can take more than 60 seconds to load according to the footer message of PHP-Nuke and this is not only for sending mails. Despite this PHPInfo says max execution time of 30 seconds for PHP. The site never time out anylonger, but earlier it happened on average 7 times a week and sometimes even 120 times a week, when the site was very slow.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

Well, those are definitely symptoms of an overused server. Not good. Sad

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 127

I have now succeeded to send out the newsletter to all 1400 members. I picked out the addresses one by one from the database and put them in a textfile with 200 addresses each. Then I sent the newsletter ad hoc 5 times. I will save the textfiles to the next time I will send the newsletter to all members.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

Sorry Slack. Wish you didn't have to do that. If you can somehow reduce my need for sleep and/or increase the number of hours in the day, I'll get that !@#$% change made to where this could be done on "auto".

Nice workaround though and thanks for posting it. I was glad I added that ad-hoc feature long back on more than one occasion.

Regards,
montego