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Around 1 out of 5 times when I write a post in phpbb then press submit it will give a server error with the following -

The connection was reset. The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

Does anyone know what might be the likely cause of this? I'm not sure if it's an inadequate php.ini setting or if it's one of the many javascripts interfering with the phpBB submit, or ?

Jizbo Jonez
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2 Answers2

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If you had a script that interfered with the submit process, it would be consistent and not intermittent. The problem seems more like an issue between you and the hosting server or a problem with the hosting service. The connection error you are describing sounds specific to the Firefox browser. If you were to run the same series of tests on IE, you'd probably see a "Unable to display this web page" error.

You should raise a support issue with your host provider, though that can be a frustrating endeavor. If 4 out of the 5 times you post are successful, but 1 time fails, it seems likely that you're suffering from a connection reliability issue on the server as opposed to a software configuration issue. Unfortunately, large shared hosting providers do not have the best support. and first tier support is never pleasant. However, I'm pretty sure that server is dropping your connection and a quality support engineer can confirm that via the web server logs.

It may also be a good idea to solicit the help of someone else to conduct similar testing to confirm that it's not an intermittent routing issue between you and the server.

mchandler
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Technically, it means the server sent a TCP "reset" packet, which basically means "this connection can't be completed for some reason, so I'm killing it".

In my experience, that error usually means something went seriously wrong in the guts of the server. Maybe some daemon crashed... you'd have to check the server logs.

Perhaps it's simply overloaded, sometimes forums can require expensive hardware and they rarely have the budget for it.

Or it could be a bug in PHP or Apache.

It probably isn't a bug in the PhpBB code itself, but that's always possible. Only way to find out is to step through every line of code and see where it blows up.

Abhi Beckert
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  • I think you may be right about the server load problem. I was converting a few large videos with FFMPEG at the same time on another website on the same server. I'll check the error logs etc if it occurs again. Thanks Abhi and mchandler for the reply. If I could tick both of these answers I would :/ – Jizbo Jonez Jan 23 '12 at 10:29
  • No worries, I'm glad you've got at least a little peace of mind! ;) – mchandler Jan 23 '12 at 18:53