Diagnosing an internal 500 error – help!

  • Hi. Lately I have been having intermittent 500 errors. About once or twice a day, loading my site will become very slow, and occasionally result in an error. About every other week the problem will be very bad for a few hours. My site is hosted by Yahoo, and of course they offer no help, insisting it’s a problem with one of my scripts.

    I am confused because I can’t see a pattern to the error, and I know very little about html, css, php, etc… Also, my site only gets about 200-300 hits a day, so I don’t imagine traffic is causing this.

    How can I diagnose this problem? Are these errors logged anywhere? I’ve spent the past two days looking around the forums and the documentation, and I can’t find anything that makes sense to me.

    Any help would be very, very much appreciated.

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

  • so you have access to server logs? Often looking in there will tell you what was misconfigured or what the problem was

    Thread Starter toofout

    (@toofout)

    I… don’t even know what those would look like or where I could find them. Yahoo’s tech support was less than helpful.

    yeah, yahoo hosting sucks.

    it’s weird that it happens on and off

    Thread Starter toofout

    (@toofout)

    I’d be happy to switch from Yahoo, but I don’t want to until I’m sure that there isn’t a problem in one of my scripts (that I had no part in writing).

    I’m using the “landzilla” theme, and my stat plugins are shortstat and BAstats, but the problem pre-dates the plugins.

    Based on what I’ve just got done reading here this morning, shortstat is giving a few other folks problems. Try disabling it?

    shortstat can cause problems, but I’d still recommend getting away from Yahoo.

    mediatemple.net and asmallorange.com seem to be universally loved

    Thread Starter toofout

    (@toofout)

    So, am I right to assume that wordpress doesn’t keep any sort of error log?

    wordpress isn’t throwing the 500.

    You want to check your web server’s error logs.

    yeah, generally if you dig around in your control panel you should be able to find server logs with all the errors and all that

    toofout,

    I’m having the exact same problem. It started a few days ago and I’m also using Yahoo Business Hosting.

    Everything slows to a crawl and when you try to save the page, it takes forever. Then sometimes I get an “Error 500: Internal Server Problem. Server Cannot Be Found.”

    I thought it was just me. I’ll try to find out what the problem is and if I do, I’ll post it here. You do the same.
    Good luck to us.

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
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