Topic: What's the best way to find out why a server has hung?

[andy_baptiste]

Hello everyone!

Sorry to be asking such a basic question but I was wondering what is the best course of action to work out why an Apache server has hung.

I do the programming side but often can't see anything in the PHP logs that gives me any clue what the problem was caused by.

For example, is there a seperate Apache error log that I'm posssibly going to have access to,where would I look for it, and might it give me a clue that the php log wouldn't?

Many thanks!

[glsmith]

Yes there is an Apache error log, in Windows it's in
%ApacheRoot%/logs/error.log

It may tell you something, may not.

[maba]

The location is already mentioned in the other reply. The combination you are having (PHP / Apache) is very common.

When a web site does not return you would check 3 places (or even more).

1) of course the PHP error log
make sure your PHP.ini (during development) has the error reporting directives configured correctly
2) the Apache error log. This will typically contain errors that are reported by the PHP interpreter when it parses your code.
3) the Apache access log. This is in the same directory as the error log by default. You would check the logs based on time stamp. If the access.log contains a log entry which refers to your code and the error log does not, then the Apache log will not help you. The error must be somewhere else.

Hang problems are sometimes caused by external programs that do not close properly. I sometimes run into hang problems when I do system calls and during development these do not work properly. So every system call leads to an unterminated cmd.exe. You would find out via the task manager.

Best regards
Maba