Hi,

I've been struggling quite some time with a links page on my website http://portfolio.paternottes.net that repeatedly caused type 500 server time out errors.
I soon was able to determine that the problems ceased once I disabled the URLicon module, but I couldn't quite put my finger on the exact cause.
Today I discovered that I had included a rather fishy url in my list of links, namely "http://extra.volkskrant.nl/opinie/auteur/show/id/72/Ferry++Haan". (I simply copied this link from the original newspaper website.)
I have a strong hunch that URLicon was actually choking on the malformed url including the two + signs.

Cheers,
Stephan

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StephanP’s picture

StephanP commented
Title: Robustness against malformed url's » Revisit: 500 server time out errors on page with many external links

Hi,

I have to get back on the above issue where type 500 server time out errors are generated on accessing a page with many (30) external links.
After having checked and double-checked the code of the offending page and made certain that all links are of the correct format, I kept getting "500 Server time out problems". As a matter of fact, as I was adding more links to this page, the chances of receiving the server error grew dramatically.
So I decided to disable the Urlicon module and "Lo and behold" the server time out errors instantly disappeared.

It would appear that Urlicon is taking too much time in attempting to collect (non-existing) favicons, upon which the server fires the type 500 time-out error.

Is there something that I can change in the Apache of PHP configuration to make it more relaxed towards timely processes, such as Urlicon's favicon gathering?

Alternatively, I could imagine that a quite different approach to Urlicon where it uses an internal table/database of all the external links and favicons, and thus does the page generation without much delay. Checking for new/updated links and favicons could be done as a low-priority background process. This way, new links first get the default icon and later on receive their correct favicon if available.

I'd be interested in your view in this.
Stephan