I have a site which hasn't changed much over the past couple of years - www.ishigaki-japan.com, and until recently I had this module installed, having found that it significantly improved load times.

However, I have recently disabled it as on two occasions all content on the site has completely disappeared when the cache has been updated - I'm pretty much left with empty html files. Note that on both occasions this happened at times when no modifications to the site had been made.

I realise that I'm using an old version, but I'm concerned about updating and re-enabling the module if this bug hasn't been explicitly addressed.

Thanks, Richard

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I'm pretty much left with empty html files.

Could you clarify the statement above, are the files empty or not ? Do you have any php errors in the logs for the files ? one thing that came up in an other support request was that a redirect module was creating blank pages so it's possible that adding another module is the cause rather than boost.

RichieRich’s picture

RichieRich commented

Thanks for the quick response Philip. I'll get back to you with that - I took a copy of the contents of one of the files at the time, but that was a couple of months ago. I think it's on another PC. I'll have a hunt around.

RichieRich’s picture

RichieRich commented

Oh, and I have the Global Redirect module enabled. The problem went away when I disabled the Boost module though.

RichieRich’s picture

RichieRich commented

Here we go. I ended up with all page's html files looking like this - I think this was the cache of the homepage.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="ltr">
<!-- Page cached by Boost @ 2011-05-30 18:17:15, expires @ 2011-06-06 18:17:15 -->
Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

How experienced are you at debugging just normal html ? Do you have firebug or something that you are happy with that will show the headers. Your html file will give you the url of a page that you know must be affected by this issue, so move it, turn on boost, visit the url on your site (as in not in the cache folder), it should regenerate the file.

I suspect that they'll be a redirect on your first request which will take you elsewhere and that boost is creating a HTML page from that original first hit (no end html tag suggests didn't hit any drupal output functions), then it would be up to you to work out the best way of handling it, either by using boost exclusion rules, redirects, url aliases or even URL rewrites before the boost rules. Oh and once you've got the info turn boost off until you've worked it out.

RichieRich’s picture

RichieRich commented

I'm reasonably experienced with firebug etc - I built the site myself and a fair amount of customization was required. Having said that, I don't fully understand your redirect explanation - even if redirects are being performed as far as I'm aware all pages would have valid content, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point.

That aside, the problem is intermittent. If I turn on Boost now everything will be fine (it usually is). Then once in a while it will all go wrong. Hence, recreating the problem is likely to be difficult.

For now I think I'll disable the module and keep my eyes open to see if this issue gets reported again or solved. It's a real shame though as aside from the problem at hand this is a fantastic module.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

What you will probably find is that if you type in that URL that generated the blank page, that it will issue a 30x redirect to another page. It will send out headers to that effect and then you'll end up on another page. Boost is seeing the first "header generation" page and generating the output for that and caching it and not the page that the browser would go to (or it may be generating the second page too).

Now the problem then is

  • was the original request valid is the site supposed to show a page ?
  • can it be url aliased (which tends to work with boost)
  • what is the scope of this problem ?

There's a lot of ways to skin a cat, possibly someone could issue a patch for the 6.x branch to ask if headers have been sent or set to a specific value, and I can help in showing other ways to mitigate the issue but I work on the 7.x branch.

RichieRich’s picture

RichieRich commented

Surely the answer is 'yes' to the first two questions given that it usually displays content for the pages requested, and URL redirects do work.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Not necessarily, could be 404 pages redirected and the result of probes by botnets not caring what your site is and requesting any old URI. A URL alias is not the same as a redirect, in the comments section on this page http://drupal.org/node/120631 you'll find that there are not 30x headers sent for Drupal 6.x if Aliased.

RichieRich’s picture

RichieRich commented

Thanks Philip - you clearly have a far better understanding of this topic than I do, so I'll trust what you're saying.

Out of interest, could this affect the version 7 build too?

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

There have been some empty pages in 7.x but so far (fingers crossed) it appears to be mainly the result of bots and we recommend fast404 so that the database is not hit. There do not appear to be any issues with global redirect but because of this I'm going to have a look through to examine the http status for cache generation in 7 to refresh my memory.

RichieRich’s picture

RichieRich commented

I'm thinking of upgrading my site to Drupal 7 for this and a few other reasons. Are you confident that the issue which I've reported should not manifest itself with Drupal 7 Philip?

Some claim that Drupal 7 is actually slower than 6 without the boost module enabled, so I'm wary about upgrading if I may end up seeing the same problem.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I don't think random empty pages are present in the 7.x series, there are reports of 404 pages that have been empty. Most things come down to misconfiguration a site example.com being requested instead of www.example.com and the rewrite rule not being in .htaccess so it hits drupal/ boost instead of being rewritten and their is no settings.php so drupal/ boost caches an invalid page which appears valid.

As for speed, it does depend on so many things. Drupal 7 is a lot more amalgamation of modules and getting things from sources like the database. If the site is high traffic I think drupal 7 is faster, if however the disk is not hit much, nothing is in disk cache, databases are not tuned, then it's slower. But then this is with the defaults, and what I feel is that D6 (and any other site grows with time) and installing D7 will pare things back so would probably be faster.

(Sorry for the delay in response).