Fast CGI is the Devil
“DEAR BRK YOUR SITE IS BROKEN ALL DAY LONG I CAN’T READ IT HELP HELP HELP!! Love, your insane readers.”
Yeah, no foolin’.
/call hostmonster
“Hello, this is Hostmonster, how can I help you?”
“MY SITE IS BROKEN ALL DAY LONG I CAN’T READ IT HELP HELP HELP!!”
“Hello? Are you for real?”
“OK. My site is bigredkitty.net and it’s been honked up all day.”
“Let me take a look… yup, your error log file is huge.”
“I KNOW I KNOW IT’S BROKEN HELP HELP HELP!!!”
“No really, it’s HUGE.”
“IT’S DEAD ISN’T IT!”
“Nah. Let me run a diagnostic…”
“A DIAGNOSTIC?! IS THAT BAD?!”
“Hmm. That didn’t fix it. I’m going to escalate this to a domain specialist.”
“Do I need a letter from my Primary Care Physician?” /hahahah!
“… {silence} …”
“OK, you escalate that, I’ll sit here on hold, nice and quiet.”
“Thank you sir.”
/do doooo do do do. Manamana…
“Well, we fixed it.”
“ZOMG YAY!!! What happened?”
“Someone turned on Fast CGI and Wordpress doesn’t play nicely with Fast CGI.”
“I hate Fast CDI!”
“C.G.I.”
“Yeah! I hates it!”
“Well, you’re all set.”
“THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!”
/click
Hostmonster. They may f-you up, but they’ll admit their mistakes and fix the f-ing problem. /applaud
As for Fast CGI and Wordpress, we have no idea.
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Huh, and here I thought it was just me.
Good to see it wasn’t something on my end and that it’s now all taken care of.
The funny thing is that the error message I get only seems to pop up when I’m trying to post to your site with Chrome. When I use Firefox, I seem to be able to post comments just fine. That’s why I’m thinking it may not be your spam filter. I’ll include the exact text of the error message below
… or not. Now it’s working. I’ll shut up now.
Great blog, BTW. =)
Glad to see youre back in business!
Keep up the good work!
FastCGI is a good thing. Our web server at work uses it. It runs great. We even run wordpress on it, although we’re not running the latest version of WordPress. Maybe later versions don’t mind FastCGI as much. (Or maybe HostMonster’s implementation of FastCGI blows as much as Shammies and their thunder crap.)
But the errorlog filling up makes me laugh. Once, one of my sites stopped forwarding e-mail through the mailboxes on it to my gmail. I was wondering what the heck was up and so I sent some test e-mails. They said that my mailboxes were full and the e-mails were rejected. I opened the mailboxes and they had nothing in them. I thought, WTF?!
Then I opened up my hosting and found out that I had NO disk space left on my hosting package. I started rooting around for the source of the problem, pruning files, etc, and discovered that apparently I had an error log that was over 180MB in size. After I picked my eyes up and pushed them back in their sockets, I perused the errorlog and found out people had been hitting a page of mine I’d done some development on, but stopped half-way through, and it was throwing errors like a SOB. I killed the page and now things are fine.
To give you some sense of scale… a single ascii character is a byte. 180MB is 180 million bytes (well, there abouts, there’s some funky stuff with bytes in powers of 2) but think about a text file with 180 million characters in it and boggle.
I thought you got extremely popular. 6 million hits a day popular. I felt so lost these past few days.
Roflmao do doooo do do do.
I pwn those n00bs with my uber leet hax…
Great post, I laughed at “I hate CDI.”
Yay, you’re back
But damn you, I”m going to be humming the manamana song all day now.
A tech note for those who want to know:
CGI = Common Gateway Interface.
CGI is the traditional way of allowing a web server to server up dynamic content.
Dynamic content is generated by a program, that is not the web server.
The web server needs to pass information to the program that generates the dynamic information. So some clever Lad’s and lasses invented a standard protocol to move information from the web server to a program that would then hand back a web page and called it CGI.
later some more clever Lads and lasses felt that CGI was too slow and cumbersome so the invented Fast-CGI, but not all web servers implement fast-cgi and they don’t all implement it in the same way.
others adopted other technologies like application servers and a huge gamut of different ways to generate Dynamic content.
Here end the half baked lesson.
as for what happened to http://www.bigredkitty.net I would guess that some configuration was incorrect for Fast-CGI filling up the error log and then eating up all of it’s disk space. With no Disk space left the fast-cgi said “hold up there” the web server then responded with HTTP Error 503 service is not available.
The tech cleared the error log and then for good measure turned off fast-cgi because it was the one spitting out errors to fill the log. Known as treating the symptoms not the cause. I hope that you really did not need fast-cgi BRK.
I think the little gnome that was messin with your site was here at my work also. Lost 6 hours of work due to his medeling. is not the web and computers grand
hooray!
man, i thought it was either me, or the tube line to your site was b0rked. glad to hear it was the tube. you sound like me when i talk to tech support, btw. manamana!
I love Hostmonster.
They’re so friendly, even if they can’t help. *hosts her website with them*
“Do I need a letter from my Primary Care Physician?” /hahahah!
This made the post for me. Also I <3 Hostmonster too!