Problem : Internal Server Error 500

Yesterday(Jun-26-2009) our blog was down and got the internal server error 500.So we immediately mailed Dreamhost(our host) support to see the issue and got a support ticket.

We Checked the  error log  which was stating “Premature end of script headers: index.php” error for every hit made.We came to know many had this problem previously in their sites mostly due to some script error in the plugin installed in wordpress.

While waiting for support reply we started to search the web for some solution about internal server error 500 and 503.

We followed some suggestion to solve error 500 like : -

1. Rename wp-cache-config.php

2. Disable the plugins.This we cant do because wordpress was installed in the root folder which made impossible to login and disable the plugins through web interface.

3. Just click Change fully hosted settings actually without making any changes in dreamhost panel

Unfortunately these didn’t work for us.

Today(Jun-27-2009) morning we got the reply mail from dremhost as

I was looking through your error logs and I found one issue that definitely could contribute to the 500 errors that you’re experiencing:

[Fri Jun 26 12:40:29 2009] [notice] mod_fcgid: too much  /home/fordevs/fordevs.com/index.php process(current:4, max:4), skip the spawn request

These errors can be contributed to several things:

1.) Plugins or extensions that are causing the site to load ineffectively, this is common with 3rd party scripts as they are   generally poorly coded.

2.) Your over all site is maxing out the allocated amount of RAM for your user. Unfortunately for security reasons we can’t reveal the amount available to each user, but this could be a contribution to the error.

How we solved the issue?

As the support mail also says it may be due to plugin we decided to solve it ourselves taking the suggestion from a forum discussion .We backed up the plugin folder from webftp and deleted all the plugin there.

After deleting the plugins the site was working fine.We could not exactly say which pulgin made the mess.

If you get the same error just try this but cant assure this method will work for you.

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