After upgrading a site index page 504 gateway timeout

| SYSTEM INFORMATION||

Hi all, I need a help to understand.
Recently I’ve upgraded an old version of SimpleMachines forum just to let it updated, as we all know that script left behind may be a good tool for vulnerability.
Unfortunately ONLY the main page (index.php)gives me an error that it seems to be server side, but I don’t really know what to do.
Checking in the apache error log this is the response:

[Mon Dec 18 17:35:22.272453 2023] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 1182153:tid 1182262] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 116.****] AH01075: Error dispatching request to : (polling), referer: https://www.di+++.net/forum

and

[Mon Dec 18 17:35:22.272453 2023] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 1182153:tid 1182262] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 116.20***:4+++8] AH01075: Error dispatching request to : (polling), referer: https://www.dis***net/forum
[Mon Dec 18 17:35:22.272453 2023] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 1182153:tid 1182262] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 116.20***:4+++8] AH01075: Error dispatching request to : (polling), referer:  https://www.dis***net/forum

From 3 days I am trying to set up all, but no luck.
Can you please help me?

This isn’t my field of expertise, but, is this the domain error log or the Apache server error log?
/var/log/virtualmin/domain_error_log

or

/var/log/apache2/error.log

What’s in the PHP error log?

In php.log (not php error log) related string are the followings:

[20-Dec-2023 22:07:17 Europe/Helsinki] PHP Fatal error:  Maximum execution time of 130 seconds exceeded in /home/di**t/public_html/old_forum/Sources/Subs.php on line 2662
[20-Dec-2023 22:07:48 Europe/Helsinki] PHP Fatal error:  Maximum execution time of 130 seconds exceeded in /home/d***t/public_html/old_forum/Sources/Subs.php on line 3105
type or paste code here

I dont’t know if it could be helpful…

That seems to indicate something is really slow.

You could turn on slow query logging in Mariadb to see if you can find a specific slow query; adding an index or rewriting that one query (or disabling the feature that makes it) might solve it.

It doesn’t have to be database, of course. Could be many other things that are timing out. DNS is a common culprit. Is there anything on that page that would trigger a DNS lookup or web request? (e.g. does it authenticate to some other service or something?)

Look in that Subs.php and figure out what it’s doing. Something is real slow (or hung and simply not even trying to do something).

If the slow thing is something you don’t need, you could comment it out until you’re able to figure out how to fix it properly.

Also, I suspect going to the SimpleMachines community will be more fruitful. This is an application issue, almost certainly unrelated to Virtualmin.

I must investigate, as I do have many sites, and even another forum (InvisionPower) that work so well in another directory of the same site), so as many other sites on Virtualmin that work really maybe better than when I was with WHM. The only trouble came with that forum (Simplemachines, as I was in the staff for a period) after the upgrade. By fortune, it’s not a crucial site, it’s closed from 2011.
I will try to check tables on MariaDB, the structure of SMF strings is very simple.

The website is very poor. The latest documented recommendation was for a php5 version. I can’t even find what the latest recommended php version is for the current software in the install requirements.

Do you mean SMF?

Yeah. They have a forum so you can probably check there. The documentation effort seems a tad scattered at best.

Took a bit but any php over 7 seems OK.
wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF2.1:Requirements_and_recommendations

I’ve been there for a while, I guess more than 12 years ago. In the italian section as forum assistant. But too many people…and I left. It wasn’t that bad if you think that the list of online users was always not less than 200.000 people. Impossible to manage that (for free).
Now I see that since then not that much has changed, nor for InvisionPower, the forums are definately dying if ther is not a specific argument (like here). Facebook was the killer

Eventually they confirmed that 8.3.1 is a too advanced version of PHP to be held from their script. Deleted the forum. Useless.
Thank you @ID10T to focus on a simple but not-easy-to-accept point totally ignored by me.

Virtualmin supports multiple versions of PHP.

www.virtualmin.com/documentation/web/multiplephp/

Yes, and I use most of them: 7.4, 8.0, 8.1 up to the last. But for the same website I cannot use and I don’t want to use more versions of php. example.com is with php 8.3.1, example.com/forum cannot use php 7.4. The problem shoud be of the forum software, as nobody use to develop updated codes. Just to procrastinate a massive work.

Conversion to php 8.0 is not too bad to do from php 7.4 but it would appear smf is a dead product that no one is willing to convert. Try mybb which is php 8.x compliant

I do have multiple php versions installed, despite I prefer for security reasons always recent versions.
The forum that I would hold updated was closed, it was only a nice memory to hold alive for people who would love to read it, as it was well frequented (and ADS were a good source of money once, not now).- But as I saw SMF pretty dead (and I am sorry as I gave my contribute to the developers for long time many years ago), I backupped the directory and deleted all.

Don’t be. In open source we help where we can and it benefits others.

just for completeness here, someplace I have notes (maybe even from these very forums !!), but never actually did it myself, as to how to configure a specific page or URL on a website to use a different version of php from all the other pages on the same site.

This is unrelated to the topic, create a new topic.