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I've been making Joomla! sites for a while, and I'm used to seeing the white screen of death etc. I know how to troubleshoot those, and I know when they are happening. But this is different.

It's still a white screen, but on the whole, the DOM loads, and some of the containers. It seems to me that there's some kind of a database error, because the structure loads, but the content doesn't. No error actually shows, and no content, but if you examine the HTML you can see it is there.

Worse still, it's inconsistent, sometimes reloading the page makes it work. So it's really hard to troubleshoot. I had one that was doing it consistently, I examined the html and it started working again, and now it's working consistently. I can't troubleshoot something that works.

It's happening across multiple sites, using multiple templates, and template providers. Using the same host. It seems to be only on Joomla! 2.5

Can anyone else explain what is happening, have any others had the same issues?

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    Have you set error reporting to development in the Global Configuration and also checked the browser console for any JS errors? Some hosts also try to prevent users from having old CMS installations on their servers, so seeing as 2.5 is now unsupported, maybe try asking them to confirm it's nothing to do with them
    – Lodder
    Commented Jun 12, 2015 at 10:30
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    Do you have any heavy js scripts? Can you check loading times in console?
    – Plamen
    Commented Jun 12, 2015 at 11:14
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    And maybe some links to these sites would allow us to have a look and give a better opinion
    – FFrewin
    Commented Jun 12, 2015 at 11:54
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    Yup, extremely heavy scripts could possibly be an issue. Could you provide a link to your site? If not, please run your site on the Pingdom Speed Test Tool and show us the results
    – Lodder
    Commented Jun 12, 2015 at 13:27
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    The server should keep error logs. Look them up (either the files or from the control panel UI, varies) or ask the support to do so. Error logs can be surprisingly informative...
    – Ville Niemi
    Commented Jun 12, 2015 at 15:05

3 Answers 3

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Exceeding resource limitations can cause intermittent issues.

  • try increasing the PHP memory_limit by creating or editing the php.ini and adding memory_limit = 512M or similar or make this change via the PHP Settings in cPanel (or similar hosting control panel)

  • in cPanel (or similar), check for any CRON jobs that might be causing an excessive load

  • in Awstats in cPanel (or similar), check for excessive "Robots/Spiders visitors" visits - 20,000 hits / 500MB per month or thereabouts from Google and similar is probably reasonable but if there is much more than this, you may need to detect and block spammers

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    Thanks Neil good tips, the problem seemingly solved itself. These are definitely the type of tips I would try if it occurs again. Possibly my security software or my host stopped the third option.
    – Eoin
    Commented Dec 14, 2015 at 11:19
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I'd put money on the fact that your site is on a heavily-oversubscribed shared host that is throttling connections to the MySQL server. Solution, get a better web host.

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  • Thank you I will check this, I think my host is pretty good, but I will certainly check it.
    – Eoin
    Commented Jun 15, 2015 at 12:51
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I'm going to suggest that this was possibly cache failing.

I was using

  • Jot Cache
  • Joomla! Cache
  • JCH Optimise

I removed Jot Cache and life improved. I think I could also have set up a Cron job to clear the cache and that would have worked too.

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