phpBB3 WSOD (White Screen of Death)
September 12, 2007I 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.
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.
Hi Morgan,
Glad the post helped you, but sorry it wasn’t really able to offer any easier solution!
I do realise that gzip compression causes the same issue as described in the post, as I was getting lots of errors on my firewall machine informing me that the compression method was “unsupported”.
Glad to see my posts are helping at least one person out there, and well done on getting the issue fixed. I need to get round to updating the board to phpBB3 Gold!
Rob
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
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?
Are you accessing the forum from behind a firewall/proxy? If so try disabling HTTP compression on that device. Otherwise it looks like webserver config or a bad download that’s doing it. Also try enabling PHP error display in the php.ini file.
Rob
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.phpplease help me , i am blank at the moment
If the file has no execute permissions, then you can give it by running the command:
sudo chmod +x index.phpHowever, you should not actually need execute permissions on your PHP files, if my memory serves me correctly. Have you tried googling that particular error? It looks like a corrupt install to be honest, or something has changed your files, as the default phpBB install should most certainly “just work”.
Good luck anyway, let me know how things go.
Rob
I had the problem too. When I manually empty the cache folder it worked again.
Thank you, Carsten! I was about to reinstall my board for the 3rd time! Clearing the cache was the simple charm!
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.
Thanks for posting your solution. It seems like another fairly simple way to troubleshoot this issue is to simply clear the cache.
Also it looks like this problem is by no means solved, so this post may still be of use to a lot of people!
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.