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Asked: 2026-06-06T00:51:57+00:00

Error I have a web app with a mass uploader (Plupload) for photos and

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Error
I have a web app with a mass uploader (Plupload) for photos and when I upload say twenty photos, about six (around 30 %) will fail with an Internal Server Error. I have checked the Apache error.log for this domain and it has nothing new (I know I’m looking at the right error.log since older errors did show here).

This only happens on my VPS on Dreamhost (my hosting provider) servers while on my development server it runs silky smooth.

Oh, and things used to work just fine a month ago and then just started to fail. Back then I was using Uploadify and since that used Flash, it was impossible for me to debug where the upload failed.

Files and script
Uploaded files are photos, all about 100 kB big, even though I’ve successfully uploaded (and still can) 3 MB photos. My .htaccess naturally doesn’t change during uploads. On the server side is a PHP script that uses GD2 library to move and resize the photo.

Server state
I have recently upgraded my VPS from 300 to 400 MB of RAM. This thing used to work and I upgraded it just so that memory is ruled out as a reason. Also my memory limit for PHP is at 200 MB, so this should sufice.

I am getting mighty frustrated that Dreamhost does not want to help, stating that “we can not be responsible for an error your code causes” and “We still will not be able to assist you in debugging the issue unfortunately.”
It has been a week of sparse “support” while my app doesn’t work and my clients are frustrated.

Questions

  1. Is this kind of “You’re on your own” support a standard across the
    industry, i.e. would your host handle this differently?
  2. How exactly can I debug this?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m going to assume that you have a standard Apache + PHP setup. One possible configuration is the pre-forked setup; in this case Apache will adapt to system load by forking more children of itself.

    With only 400 MB of RAM you’re pretty tight, so if you’re running 20 processes that each take 200MB (assuming every process handles pretty big files using GD) you’re getting into some hot waters with the memory manager.

    I would reduce the total number of instances to 2 first to see how this will go; also keep an eye on the memory usage by running top.

    Regardless, it might be beneficial for you to run a separate task manager such as Gearman to perform resize tasks so that the upload only has to focus on moving the uploaded file and run the resize task; this way you can greatly reduce the memory required to run your PHP instances.

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