I'm still running v7.3, which will hopefully not be for long though.

But today my forum started acting up. At first it started timeing out on request intermittently, then it started working again for a while. Not for long though, because then it went down hard.

I've spent the entire evening debugging, which wasn't easy because of other unrelated computer problems. In the end I found the problem to be two functions calls that just made the system freeze up. The script didn't stop running with an error, it just never seemed to respond really.

First:
session_save_path() call in ubbthreads.inc.php

So I removed that and set it in a php_flag setting in the .htaccess file.

Second:
flock() in the lock_and_write() function in ubbthreads.inc.php

Same thing, so I removed the calls to it for now. Seems to be just for cache files, but still doesn't feel like a good solution.

I don't know why it should just stop working without warning, and why it behaved the way it did. Can't find anything strange in the php.ini file either, like disabling those functions.

My hosting provider is doing server upgrades, which might be the reason. But it doesn't really look like they're doing it right now. Have to wait until the morning until I can get an answer from them.

Any thoughts, anyone?

It turns out the host is running NFS so flock() won't work.

Strange thing is, we haven't had any problem since we switched to this host. And they say they've always run it. So what is really going on here?

And it still doesn't explain why session_save_path() isn't working.

Also, would be nice to be able to turn off the flock() functionality without changing the code.

Just made a note to add the ability to turn off flock for v8. A bit odd that it just stopped working. Any news from the host on what all they did during their server upgrades?

On the session_save_path bit, just out of curiosity are there a lot of files in there, and is anything being created in there at all?

It was over 4000 files or something, can't remember. Seemed a bit excessive.

Deleted all of the session files as best I could without a proper ftp client.

Added a gc_probability (or something) suggestion from here.

Have had a discussion with the hosting provider over twitter and they say they haven't changed anything. So there shouldn't even have been an upgrade. I don't believe it though. But the support answer on email was even less helpful than the twitter discussion. I'm thinking about giving them a call next week and if I get any more information out of that I'll post it here.

The whole.. can't obtain a lock on NFS file systems ... thing led to semaphore locking on UBB.classic.

Shame that's still the case years later.

where did my post go?

Olle, what about fcntl instead of flock?

http://us2.php.net/dio_fcntl

I'll give it a try and see how it works out. Thanks for the tip.