Periodic blank page

I am seeing this exact behavior, on a site running Boost 7.x-1.x-dev on Drupal 7.9. Any ideas on what is causing it?

I've had the same issue and did not notice until I left the site alone for a couple of days. Before that, while I was actively adding and updating content I was also clearing the cache frequently so the latest content would go live. Once I stopped deleting the cache folder, that's when I started getting complaints from users saying all they get are blank pages. One workaround I did for a while was to set the duration of the cache up to 5 days. That gave me some peace while I was off work for a few days.

I thought the issue was resolved by the last update. But I noticed again today blank pages were back again so I have disabled boost until we figure out how to fix it.

Confirmed. My site is running Domain Access, if thats any help; I know there were some configuration issues there a couple of years ago.

Exact same issue. The front page of the site was OK (panel), as well as Tagedelic, and everything else was white screen with the source only showing the boost comment.

I haven't checked the site in a few days so it could have been performing this way for a few days.

Love to fix it, too busy right now and I installed it mainly to test the dev-boost for 7. The performance was quite good.

Same issue here on a very simple 7.10 site , the module works well otherwise.

Cron set to run every 6 hours with the html boost cache expiration set at 1 hour.

Just thinking, is that the issue?

Cron set to run every 6 hours with the html boost cache expiration set at 1 hour.

There may be a problem with redrawing the pages at the expiration, since Cron is only running every 6 hours (in this example).

It had crossed my mind, however, I assumed that if the cache file for a page was cleared it would be recreated when needed - like the page had never been cached? I might be wrong, I'll test it out.

The pages are re-created when needed, not by cron. So having a slow cron only means that sometimes, pages take more time before expiring.

A fix was just comitted in #1430942: All caches are flushed on every cron related to the fact that all the cache was flushed on every cron run. It will not fix your issue, but might help a bit. (if your host has limited ressources, and a full cache flush uses too many ressources)

There was a also an issue fixed on January 23rd for redirects causing a blank page: #1176534: Bypass caching on redirects.

Other than that, if the bug cannot be systmatically reproduced, it will be hard to diagnose. If it's a blank page without the boost footer, it could be a PHP/system error. If it has the boost footer, it's a boost issue, so should be possible to reproduce it systematically.

Also make sure your Drupal cache is disabled: boost cache cannot be generated if the page is served from the Drupal cache, and core cache can make diagnostics harder.

Regarding reproducing the problem, I've noticed pages accessed through URL Redirects seem to be more susceptible.

Second observation: if I have the blank page issue occurring the file index.php_.html is present in the /cache/normal/www.sitename.com directory. If I delete only this file, then the page that was previously blank white space is regenerated and displays with normal full content. I've not tested it but I think the file index.php_.html (which contains nothing except "

") may be what Apache is serving up instead of the one with the desired cached content.

Perhaps someone with in depth knowledge of how boost works can shed some light on this.

The file index.php_.html is the static page cache for the front page. Can you confirm that you are running the latest dev snapshot of boost 7.x-1.x?

@bgm
Sorry for slow response. I thought replies to this thread were being emailed to me so I missed your comment until now...

Yes I'm running latest 7.x-1.x-dev snapshot of boost.

I think I have found a workaround or hopefully the problem source. I've noticed this issues crops up frequently when the server approaches its limit on physical memory. Since its an easy change on my Vsphere box, I've jumped the allocated ram from 512 MB to 2 GB and for over a month have not had a problem with boost.

It might be helpful if others could comment on how much ram their servers have.

Thanks for the update. Considering there have not been recent reports on this, and I have not run into this issue at all, I'll close this issue for now. If anyone can reproduce it, please re-open.

Also, if it's a blank page issue, please make sure you have access to your webserver logs so that we can debug with a specific error message.