Rob Golding

Technology Consultant

phpBB3 WSOD (White Screen of Death)

I don't know whether this is a popular or well-heard-of problem or not, but I have come across this twice now. The phpBB forums over at maxms.net have suffered the second "White Screen of Death" incident since I installed them. Firstly, I disabled Gzip compression to fix the issue. This time though, it wasn't so easy.

I ended up being forced to reinstall the same version of phpBB to another directory on the server, into a new database. Then I renamed the new DB to something different, and changed the old one to the new one's name. Phew! So in the end, I had a new install of phpBB, but with the same data as before - and it worked perfectly.

So if anyone else comes across this issue, firstly try disabling HTTP compression on any device in front of the web-server (which for me was MS ISA Server 2006). If that doesn't work, it looks like it has to be a reinstall - the longest process will be renaming the DB's, however, so be careful.

Anyhow, the forums are now back up and running - at forums.maxms.net. Hopefully this seemingly endless list of problems to fix is over now.

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  • Hi Morgan.

    Is it possible for You, to explain why the heck, I get that WSOD, during the INSTALL?

    I can't even install the forum, it worked on another host, but they didn't support mails ><

    Best Regards
    Mr. Hansen, Denmark.
  • I just want to let you know that this may be the only solution page I found for the wsod problem, and since that is the case, I thought I might share my experience.

    On one of the systems (the site above) that I admin for, the database is something that the web host maintains control of, so I couldn't try the second solution you suggested.

    Since GZIP was disabled, and has since been re-enabled without problem, I decided to take a look through the cache. I turned up nothing, so deleted the whole thing.

    The next time I loaded the forum, it worked.
  • Linda
    Thank you, Carsten! I was about to reinstall my board for the 3rd time! Clearing the cache was the simple charm!
  • I had the problem too. When I manually empty the cache folder it worked again.
  • i am getting a blank white page when trying to open my site :

    here is what i am getting from my error log
    [2008-10-06 08:11:19]: error: file has no execute permission: (/home/xxxxxx/public_html/forum/index.php)


    just before the above error, the erroe log showed the following error:
    [Mon Oct 6 08:03:18 2008] [error] [client 59.184.6.226] Premature end of script headers: /home/xxxxxx/public_html/forum/index.php

    please help me , i am blank at the moment
  • Sam
    I went to go and do what you said, created the new database and directory..uploaded the same version of phpBB, go to install and get the white screen on the install option.

    Now what do I do?
  • Lux
    I've got a problem that seems similar but must have a different cause.

    Using php BB3. I just finished installing the program, and the admin console seems to work fine, and the create new usernames/register function seems to be working fine, but when the menu tries to return to index.php for my forum, this blank white screen appears. I'm new to webdevelopment and don't know a ton about php, is it likely that I have the same problem?
    -Lux
  • Hi Rob,

    I had the same problem. When I set phpBB3 to use gzip compression from within the admin panel, I suddenly got the WSOD. I went into the database and manually switched the gzip_compress config_value in the phpbb_config table back to 0 (off), but it didn\'t fix the problem. Then in the same record of the table I changed the is_dynamic field to 1 (was 0). This fixed it. Don\'t know if you tried changing settings on both of those fields.

    I use shared hosting, but I\'m pretty sure my server was already set up to do gzip compression without having to set it from within phpbb. Maybe the duplication of the service is what caused the problem? I think this must be a bug in phpbb3.

    Thanks for you post! It help me know I was looking in the right place to fix this.
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