PHP Timed Out on IONOS Shared Hosting

I ‘successfully’ upgraded a site to MODX 3 but shortly after, the site went down with an Error 500. I soon realised that this was because one page was trying to create thumbnails for too many images in one go. Stupid of me to have let that page grow so big without paginating the results. The only thing is, PHP seems to have crashed out altogether in this hosting package and I’m having trouble explaining this to ionos support. I tried putting a simple info.php file in a separate folder and that also brings up an error 500. Anybody know of a way of somehow restarting PHP in this situation? Sorry if I’m not explaining it very well.

Switching PHP Version should do a restart.

That’s what I was hoping but it doesn’t seem to be the case

If it’s throwing a 500 error on a non-MODX file, take a close look at your .htaccess file. Also, remember that the MODX .htaccess file launches .index.php and that file launches MODX any time it doesn’t find a physical file. Manually deleting all files in your core/cache folder can’t hurt.

Hi Bob. To make sure it wasn’t htaccess, I set up a separate directory and pointed a different domain to it. In there I just had index.html and info.php. The info.php returned an error 500 - so nothing to do with MODX as such.

What seems to have caused the problem is either Resizer in PHP 8+ or so many thumbnails being created at once (due to lack of paging in a blog section) it ‘blew’ PHP away altogether. The error 500s weren’t from MODX - they were direct from ionos.

It’s working this morning - what I did last night was to go into the database and disable Resizer, repair paging and remove image resizing on blog summaries.

My guess is that overnight PHP kicked back in possibly just because I escaped from some sort of sanction because of going over limits.

Your theory sounds good to me. Was Resizer processing every image on every page load?

Not on every page load but on one page containing about 250 images.

Try lowering the timeout in your MODX config or look into async image processing to take the load off. IONOS support may have limited flexibility on shared hosting.