By jamesd688 on

Hi,
After a period of time the home page does not appear and the "Page not found" message is shown instead. If the cache is cleared the site works as expected. Though this problem reoccurs again after a period, which is then fixed again by clearing the cache

The site that is built using the latest 6.20 Drupal Core. The site makes use of View, Panels and the usual modules. All modules are upto date with the latest stable versions running. It makes use of clean URLs, the home page is /home and this is set correctly in the Site Information admin page as being the home page. Cacheing is set to normal on the Performance admin page.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this has caused the site to plummet in the Google rankings, presumably because Google is getting a 404 when they try to crawl the site.

Thanks,

James

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

jimkeller’s picture

jimkeller commented

We're seeing this exact issue on one of our sites as well and haven't been able to pin down why the 404 is happening (and subsequently being cached AS the homepage). Have you discovered anything since posting?

ayesh’s picture

ayesh commented

I had this problem due to caching expiration problems.
First, do not use core caching with Boost(or similar) module. Also, make sure that Panels' , Views' and other modules' caching do not conflict with Boost.

What's new and changing in PHP 8.4

jamesd688’s picture

jamesd688 commented

I am still seeing this issue. I have done some more research and it appears to be the consolidated CSS file not being found.

The example log entries is as follows.

Type: Page not found
Message: sites/default/files/ctools/css/752583b4295aa05494b705ac51611114.css

Type: Page not found
Message: sites/default/files/css/css_1f1a2a7caec3083a8b9c49b26f39e9b4.css

Type: Page not found
Message: sites/default/files/js/js_f5288da26553036c938274c9b50975cb.js

Because Drupal cannot find the CSS file the user will get a page not found error message.

The modules I am using are as follows (too numerous to list but the ones that may be relevant to this issue)

Panels 6.x-3.9
Views: 6.x-2.12
Chaos tools: 6.x-1.8
Cache Exclude: 6.x-2.1
IE CSS Optimizer: 6.x-1.1

For the production site I have the follow settings enabled.

Caching mode: Normal
Minimum cache lifetime: None
Page compression: enabled
Block cache: disabled
Optimise CSS files: Full optimization
Optimize JavaScript files: Enabled

This issue shows in the logs every couple of days and seems to be intermittent. Though this does not always cause the site to repeatedly show a 404 for subsequent visitors. Though on other occasions all subsequent visitors will see a 404 error.

I am not using Boost.

I will check the individual cache settings for views, pages , etc

beetlecat’s picture

beetlecat commented

That is pretty much exactly what my new drupal 6.20 site is exhibiting.

I've just realized it was the caching, and I've turned everything off, but I may experiment to see what particular type of caching does this. Or if I need to generate a new "home" page.

The rest of the site is fully accessible (including the menus, etc.) -- it's only the home page content itself that winds up missing.

Most peculiar.

mshmsh5000’s picture

mshmsh5000 commented

We have been puzzling over this for months with a site that has spurts of 404 home page responses that don't seem to follow any pattern, including cron, traffic spikes, or CRUD activity. We've tuned the environment and infrastructure, enabled extra logging around the 404 events, and tried recreating in multiple other instances of the app, but we still only see this problem on the production site.

So is anyone in this thread saying that you definitely saw this issue go away when you disabled all manner of cache? That's encouraging, but unfortunately not an option for our site -- traffic is way too high. So we'll need to pinpoint the culprit.

I'm relieved to see that other people are experiencing this! Boy, now all we need is an isolated root cause.

Matt Holford

ayesh’s picture

ayesh commented

As a solution - actually a workaround - use Panels to override default front page(/node) and put all views, blocks, etc here. That won't need much change because most of us create menus with rather that /home or /index.

In case of any Views, Panels, theme or anything else which causes this 404 error occur, you can think atlease it's strange(and this is a serious error) which gives a 404 for /node path.

What's new and changing in PHP 8.4

mshmsh5000’s picture

mshmsh5000 commented

@Ayesh: The OP indicates that Panels is already in place.

This issue isn't related to D 6.20, but looks like the a particularly promising path of inquiry:

http://drupal.org/node/853864

BTW, we reconstructed the home page with and without Panels -- 404 home pages in both cases. Because Views "page" displays can throw drupal_not_found(), we made sure all Views called in the home page were non-page (default, block, etc.). The 404s persisted.

Matt Holford

jamesd688’s picture

jamesd688 commented

As the issue is somehow related to cacheing I thought I would investigate the cache settings for the individual views used on the home page. Most of the views are simple lists and the cacheing is set to use "simple cache" and the lifetime is 1 hour.

The odd one out is a view which makes use of the Flickr 6.x-1.2 module. It shows a series of random photos on the home page. I wanted this to change the photos displayed every 15 minutes therefore the lifetime was set to 15 minutes.

I have since changed the lifetime for the cache of the Flickr view to 12 hours and the issue is occurring less frequently.

Not conclusive and this may be a misnomer but thought I would post my observations.

Matt Walker’s picture

Matt Walker commented

I know this is old, but I'm posting here to see if anyone might have figure out the reason for this. I have a handful of Drupal sites, but only one has this problem.

Dumping the cache solves the problem. When it first occurred, my client was running some banner ads on another site and I thought it might have to do with the tracking string in the link making things wobbly. But I don't think client is running any ads right now, and I was just greeted with the problem.

The site uses Views, but not on the home page. The home page is actually very simple -- there aren't any stories on it or dynamic content at all. It's basically just a display of a random image and a video (both coded into page-front.tpl) and two menus.

Last time this happened, I spent xmas weekend checking the site every two hours and dumping the cache. It seemed to straighten itself out after a while. I've got a cache exclusion set for .

Anyone figure anything out yet? Does completely disabling cache make this go away?

javlinsharp’s picture

javlinsharp commented

I too am "enjoying" this issue. Like others here my frontpage is simple, and running in v6.22
Here we are nearing xmas weekend, and Ill probably spend it clearing cache just as Matt Walker did.

As another workaround, I am considering disabling cache altogether for now. My site is low traffic enough, and the performance loss should be manageable. Either way, this is a frustrating one.

vinplex’s picture

vinplex commented

The issue for me suddenly came up about 3 weeks ago. Like everyone else's, ours seems to be an issue related to cron and cache. Our problem started after the twice-daily cron was run. When I run cron manually or flush cache, the problem goes away. At the same time, we developed another problem where the text changes on the site wouldn't update unless we flushed cache (the two issues happened too close together to be a coincidence). So we disabled cache but the same problem came up at irregular intervals (however, the text updates no longer required a cache flush to show up). I tried running the cron every minute to see if there was any pattern to lead to the error. Everything ran fine for the 15 hours we did that. When we put it back on our twice daily schedule, it failed after the morning cron (our cron runs at 7AM and 7PM).

All modules are up-to-date and we're using 6.24 Core (haven't updated to 6.25). We're checking the site every day at 7AM and 7PM to correct the error if it turns up. Does anyone think it's a server problem and not a Drupal one? I don't know enough about server issues and the host hasn't been much help, but at this point I'm just trying to rule things out.

regi.bradley’s picture

regi.bradley commented

I'm having this same exact issue after deploying Drupal 6.24 a few weeks ago. At the same time, I also deployed a couple of module updates, but I think these are not the problem.

What I'm noticing in my logs is a 403.shtml error for the front page immediately after cron is run. I have cron scheduled to run every 15 minutes but I'm only seeing the problem about twice a day. Have you found a solution for your issue?

vinplex’s picture

vinplex commented

Our problem seems to have gone away, however, I'm not yet sure the reason why (I'll need a little more time to investigate further). Here's what happened/what we did:

--We noticed that there were two phantom new 'users' created on our site. Since we no longer were having people register with the site, we shut that down and deleted the accounts.
--We noticed that after each cron run, that an immediate 403 error was registered from a request from a certain IP. We banned the IP.
--We shut down the backup and migrate module which we were using as extra backup. Reason we did this was the theory that it was cluttering things up when cron was run. Basically a shot in the dark.
--Banned a range of IPs that were spam harvesters.
--Secured the cron so that it would no longer be accessible via browser, although nobody other than us ran it.

So far we've been unable to figure out the exact reason for the original problem, even after reviewing changes stemming from the time our troubles began. We plan on doing some more research when time permits. If we find out anything else, I'll definitely post again. Hope this helps somewhat.

regi.bradley’s picture

regi.bradley commented

Thanks for your insights. I seem to also have resolved the problem, though what did it for me is to change the default front page from a URL alias (home) to a nid (node/123).

The similarity that I see with what you experienced is that we also saw an immediate 403 error after each cron run, though the IP was pointing to our own server.

rhouse’s picture

rhouse commented

I have reported this in the core issues queue but no notice is being taken of it so far: http://drupal.org/node/1491748

I suggest anyone else having problems should add their comments over there. Also I registered it as priority normal, but that might be too low given that sites are effectively being disabled "behind the backs" of their owners.

Singh.Abhishek’s picture

Singh.Abhishek commented

Hi,

I am also facing the same issue.

I am getting 404 Errors on cache:my_website_name.com.

Google Search console also gave me a 404 error on submitting the sitemap.

Kindly give support to anyone as it is very important.