Drupal site randomly hangs

Drupal site hangs for long periods of time at seemingly random intervals. Server isn't down - I can execute phpinfo.php or other things outside of Drupal. Hours later Druapl suddenly start working again.

Checking the mysql server with phpmyadmin I see a sleeping process appear each time I refresh the browser. mysql server is running and responding to the phpmyadmin queries. What is hanging? How to id the script or whatever that is going to sleep?

 

are you on a shared host, or a dedicated box ?

 

Shared.

The site is live at another host and never had this problem. Moved it to the new host and it keeps hanging. New hosting service says there is nothing wrong with the server, must be some "custom coding" we did. Unlikely since nothing is "custom", just core Drupal plus some commonly used contributed modules.

I suspect that php is running out of resources on the new host but I don't know how to determine that. It hangs and sometimes throws a 500 internal server error.

 

So when you say it "hangs" - do you mean you just get a WSOD, or something else?
Might just be something as simple as allocating more memory to PHP .

 

Not exactly wsod. The browser just sits waiting. Sometimes after a long period of time the internal server error is thrown. I suspect it is php memory. It's set at 16M. Can't change it either, no access to php.ini

 

You might have to go shopping for another host.. Do you know if you're running a PHP cache like eAccelerator? I have a similar problem, which i'm pretty sure is due do eAccelerator, but it only happens once a month or so.

 

can you install another Drupal site on same hosting and use default Drupal themes and modules.
If the new drupal site with all default also hangs, than its a hosting related problem.

 

That's an interesting idea aap. But I have already followed Tearabite's advice and moved to another host. The hanging problem revealed how terrible the tech support is with the old host. So I'm sure I would not want to stay with them anyway.

I'm not aware of eAccelerator. Is that something I would install or the hosting service?

 

eAccelerator is a open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache.
http://eaccelerator.net/

It can be installed by your web hosting provider or you can install if you have root access of server. If you are not facing any problem on new host, just leave it.

 

I'm up on the new host and no hanging problems so far. I should try to find out if the old host has eAccelerator installed.

 

i installed eAccelerator when I was starting to hit some performance issues. so unless you have a real busy site, or things are real slow, i wouldnt bother - so can read about how/why i did i here: Speed up your blog

 

can you give detail and link of your site i will help you