My site has intermittent problems when leaving comments. The user receives a 500 Internal Server Error, but the comment does still post. It was happening on version 4.01 and I just updated to version 4.1 and continue to have problems. Since the problem doesn't occur all the time and i'm not seeing anything in the error logs, the problem is hard to troubleshoot. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

I am now occassionally getting this error when posting blog posts as well.

Have you checked with your host to see if they are killing the process?

Here is their response:

We're not killing the process. The most likely reason for such an error would be if the memory limit is exhausted. We have a 80MB memory limit per process on our servers. Unfortunately this is just a guess, and we can't tell for sure what exactly is causing it without being able to reproduce the error while monitoring our error logs. Could you possibly provide us with a semi-reliable way to reproduce this? Please advise.

Unfortunately, i really have no way to reproduce the problem. I guess i could have them sit there while i create a bunch of blog posts and hope it happens.

Look at System Information in System Overview and make sure that Image::Magick says it's installed and ok. If not, you might have the same issue I ran into... bug in gcc-4.2.x and libgomp.so.1 and imagemagick. I had to rebuild imagemagic with --disable-openmp to fix it for now. It was actually making the imagemagick process go nuts and use up all the system ram.. until the kernel killed it off. I saw the same 500 errors in apache logs matching these problems. Haven't had a single 500 since then.

Oh, you can also test this by just running:

If it takes any time, or especially gives any library errors, you're having the same issue. If it drops right back to a command prompt, you're fine.

As an FYI, i've found the cause of this problem. The problem is that some of my categories are very large, and when creating new posts in those categories, or when people tried to leave comments on posts in those categories, i'm timing out. The problem is intermittent because some of my categories are much larger than others. I found this by scouring the internet's message boards for different reasons; nothing in my server's error logs indicated that this was the problem and my network support was unable to find the cause. I haven't "solved" the problem yet; i guess i will have to abandon the default category archives where full posts appear on the category index pages.