I installed Forward on a site, itsyourtimes.com, and it appeared to be working well. I was seeking to install other modules and had to set permissions, but when I went to "access control," I got a 500 error that the server was unable to find the page. I also had intermittent difficulty accessing the "modules" page in admin. I thought the problem was with the new module I was installing, fckeditor, but I could find nothing there. I uninstalled and still had the problem. On a whim, I switched off Forward and the problem went away. I am most eager to use the Forward module because I am running a community journalism site, so the ability to forward material is important. But so is the ability to access permissions. What about adding Forward could make access control unavailable?

Comments

seanr’s picture

seanr
he/him
commented

I have not encountered this on any of the number of sites I've installed it on, so I'm going to need much more info than that. What version of Drupal are you using? What version of PHP? Is your server running Windows or anything strange like that? The more detail the merrier.

seanr’s picture

seanr
he/him
commented

Also 500 is a server error, not a not found error. Please check your server's logs and tell me if there's anything in there relating to the error (in addition to the other info requested above).

swider’s picture

swider commented

The Drupal version is 4.6. I'm not sure about the php version, but I'm checking. Yahoo is the host, but I don't know if that tells us anything about what's running there. The Drupal logs don't show anything unusual, but I'm asking if there is other info that could lead to a clue. The server error says:

500 Internal Server Error
The server has encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

seanr’s picture

seanr
he/him
commented

Please create a file somewhere on your server called phpnfo.php with the followng contents and then post the URL here:

phpinfo();

That will print out all kinds of details about your server environment, including PHP version and OS.

Regarding the error message, you should actually have an error log on the server itself (not the one in Drupal's admin). You may have to contact yahoo and find out where it's located, but that will tell you what the actual server error was that led to that 500 page being served (that's just a generic message that doesn't show the actual error).

swider’s picture

swider commented

I now know this much:
The server is running FreeBSD with Apache Web server.
The php version is v4.1.12.

As for the log file, it has four lines from the day in question:
[21-Oct-2005 13:51:40] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 40961 bytes) in /includes/common.inc on line 1856
[21-Oct-2005 14:08:35] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 40961 bytes) in /includes/common.inc on line 1856
[21-Oct-2005 16:07:15] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 40961 bytes) in /includes/common.inc on line 1856
[21-Oct-2005 19:04:46] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 35 bytes) in /modules/search.module on line 273

I hope that helps you, because it makes no sense to me. Again, though, I had this problem when I was installing Forward, but right after trying to install FCKEditor. I installed Forward first, didn't think there was a problem, then installed FCK and found the problem, which I thought was the result of FCK. Only when, in desperation, I tried disabling Forward did I determine it was involved, perhaps even the culprit. Just some extra detail in case it helps.

Thanks,
Paul

seanr’s picture

seanr
he/him
commented
Category: bug » support
Priority: Critical » Normal
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted

What that means is that you need to increase the memory_limit setting in your PHP config file (php.ini), or have your host do it. This is actually required by CivicSpace (won't even let you install with a memory_limit of less than 24MB), but apparently the Drupal docs have not been updated to match. The reason this happens is because php by default is limited to 8MB, and with many modules installed it is very easy to exceed that limit. A base install of CivicSpace exceeds it right out of the box, and I'd guess Drupal itself isn't far behind. Ask your ISP to increase that setting to 24MB (or find a better ISP) and your problem will be solved. ;)

Also, I have put in an issue to have the Drupal documentation updated to reflect this requiremnt.

Bèr Kessels’s picture

Bèr Kessels commented

civicspace != drupal. CS ships with lots and losts of additional modules. A clean Drupal core runs well on 8 M RAM.

seanr’s picture

seanr
he/him
commented

Not if you start installing lots of modules, as he has obviously done. That's all CivicSpace is really, Drupal plus extra modules and themes and a damned nice installer. You can make Drupal look exactly like CivicSpace (with the same memory requirements) just by getting the extra modules.