500 Internal Server Error – URGENT

Its not related to WP 4.9, this is probably related to a recent PHP update, the error occurs after updating from PHP 7.0.25 to 7.0.26 or PHP 7.1.11 to 7.1.12. PHP crashes with a segmentation fault, the PHP error log shows the following error messsage:
[25-Nov-2017 10:35:15 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Couldn't execute method C_Display_Type::__get in Unknown on line 0

This could be a bug in PHP or NextGen, a temporary solution would be to switch to an older PHP version like 5.6 until the issue is resolved.

My webhoster switch back PHP to 7.0.25 and now its working again.

This bug is relevant to all PHP 7.0 and 7.1 users with the actual PHP Version.

Thank you for that. I switched PHP version back down to 5.6.32 and it seems to have solved the problem.

I didn’t think about that earlier, but I updated the PHP when I was updating WordPress because of the nag notice in WP admin that it would run faster on a newer version of PHP.

Will NGG be updated to be compatible with newer versions of PHP?

Im not the plugin developer, but because its relevant for all PHP 7.0 and 7.1 user with the most recent PHP version, I think there will be a bug fix in the next NGG version.

At the moment for me its not really clear, if this is a NGG bug or a PHP bug. If its a PHP bug i hope NGG write an workaround, if its an NGG bug i hope the NGG developer fix it soon.

Wait some days, than you will find here a lot of bug reports – or a new NGG version. Not all webhoster update there php version as fast as my hoster, but they will do it during the next days and then the NGG developer needs a quick workarround for this problem because its relevant for a huge user group.

I’ve got the same problem, switching the PHP to 5.6 worked for me.

Switched to PHP 7.0.26 yesterday, everything seemed OK. Probably because I didn’t do any relevant action in the dasboard.
Today, as soon as I changed a setting for another plugin, I realized that the first NextGen settings page was completely skipped and not working, occasionally with 500 Internal Server Error. In the frontend the message was “we cannot display this gallery”.
Back to 5.6 and it worked.
This topic saved my afternoon (after losing half the morning). Thanks @odak71!

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by tizz.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by tizz.

FYI, this problem is caused by this PHP bug in PHP 7.0.26 and 7.1.12:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=75573

It appears the bug has been fixed for future versions of PHP.

So it could be a month or so on 5.6 before we get the fix.

We will be waiting for the next PHP version releases to correct these issues being created by the current PHP 7.0.26 and 7.1.12 versions.

In the meantime, we strongly recommend rolling back to a previous version of PHP until these new releases have been released and distributed. Please contact your web hosting service for assistance with this process.

Thanks!

– Cais.

Having exactly the same issue today and glad I found this post.
On my error_log I get the following:

[30-Nov-2017 16:55:21 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Couldn’t execute method C_Display_Type::__get in Unknown on line 0

Disabling the plugin the error is gone. I’m with PHP version: 5.6.30
Thanks !

@imagely Your solution is to revert back to an unsupported and insecure version of PHP instead of fixing the problems with the plugin? Not cool.

@imevilduckie – the bug is a bug IN PHP. They’re already fixing it. And the problem is not specific to NextGEN Gallery, but manifests anytime related PHP methods are used.

For @imevilduckie and others, just realizing I posted about this in a different thread, and not this one. Reposting here for this thread so all context is here:

Hey all – CEO of Imagely here. I wanted to post an additional note on this. The root cause for this is a bug in two specific versions of PHP. The powers that be have already patched this on the PHP side, though have not yet released it.

The nature of the bug means that it would be an epic task for us to ‘fix’ it in NextGEN Gallery. The bug relates to PHP logic that we use throughout the plugin.

All that means that we do not intend to fix it on our side, but rather wait for PHP to release its own patch.

In the meantime, we are going to push a release that deactivates most NextGEN Gallery functionality on any servers that are running the two problem versions of PHP. This fix is being tested now, and will be released in the next couple of hours.

–

As a side note, I should emphasize that the PHP bugs have ramifications well beyond NextGEN Gallery. Mixed with a variety of other products or environments, the PHP bugs can cause server crashes. We know from internal conversations that Cloudways, for example, tried updating to 7.1.12 and then rolled back due to related issues. So if your servers are running the problem versions, they *should* be rolled back, or upgraded once the patches are released – in general and not just because of NextGEN Gallery.

If you have further questions, let us know.

– Erick

@edanzer I appreciate the insight into the problem. Apologies if I jumped the gun to pass blame. It just seems somewhat counterintuitive to downgrade to an unsupported version of PHP, and in the case of one client of mine, impossible, as their theme requires PHP 7.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Chris Lanphear. Reason: Typo

Contacted my host (VPS) and their reply was that cPanel controls what PHP versions are in the repos and updates are handled by EasyApache4. There is no way to roll back a minor version update of PHP…. the only way I see to avoid most pages being offline is to disable nextgen plugin until this has been solved.

@imevilduckie – No worries.

Just FYI, based on what we’re seeing in the reports, this should only affect versions 7.0.26 and 7.1.12. Other 7.0.x or 7.1.x versions should be fine. So for example, you can roll back to 7.1.11 and that should resolve it. Again, that’s based for now on the reports we’re seeing from the PHP community.

Also, I believe PHP released 7.2.0 this morning. We’re trying to confirm right now whether the fix was included in that release of PHP.