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We're having strange behavior on our linux server. Here are some symptoms:

1) PHP using old information when processing scripts: For example: I loaded up the site today and it ran the mobile version of our Joomla 2.5.9 template instead of the normal template. I looked through the access log and two minutes before I loaded the site up an iPhone had accessed the site. So, for some reason the PHP code ‘thought’ that my access was still the iPhone. Here’s a snip from the access log.

74.45.141.88 - - [01/Mar/2013:07:39:24 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 9771 "https://m.facebook.com" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/10B141 [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/5.5;FBBV/123337;FBDV/iPhone2,1;FBMD/iPhone;FBSN/iPhone OS;FBSV/6.1;FBSS/1; FBCR/AT&T;FBID/phone;FBLC/en_US;FBOP/0]"

...

63.224.42.234 - - [01/Mar/2013:07:43:45 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 9771 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0"

2) Links on the site are sometimes being generated within Joomla differently: sometimes "ww.sitename.com" or just "sitename.com" when it should be "www.sitename.com".

3) When I make a configuration change to the site (within Joomla administration), it doesn't always take immediately, though it should. For instance, when click publish something using the user interface, it will still be published for quite a while after I unpublished it. During a problem like this, I have tried restarting both Apache and MySQL and it didn't help. I had to wait until something updated. Eventually it does update.

4) The php session doesn't consistently work. We have code that generates a captcha from a session variable. The code fails sometimes rendering the captcha inoperable.

All the above is totally inconsistent. Sometimes it wigs out other times it doesn't. Also, note that the site works totally fine on our dev.sitename.com. We even tried to switch the Apache webserver configuration from our dev.sitename.com to our sitename.com. And the problem still persists. Lastly, our Joomla cache is turned off.

Thank you.

share|improve this question
Do you have any external (non application) caches, like APC, varnish, squid or haproxy? Where are you storing sessions? – Grizly Mar 2 at 2:42

closed as not a real question by symcbean, mgorven, Hennes, mdpc, Khaled Mar 2 at 7:55

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote

At least some of your problems described could be a result of caching.

You always should clean the Joomla cache after changing a setting.

You also could try to disable the Joomla cache and see if that helps.

share|improve this answer
I understand. The Joomla cache is not enabled. Even if I go in and purge/clean, it doesn't help. Something is happening at the server level. – Davez Mar 1 at 17:53
Check if the apache module mod_cache is activated. Maybe that is your problem. (To clarify: It should be disabled) – Duke Mar 1 at 18:23
mod_cache is not enabled. – Davez Mar 1 at 18:41
It looks like it was the Joomla cache: forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=615&t=791021. The cache was working even though it was disabled. So, if I set public $cache_handler = '' in the configuration file, it fully disabled the cache. – Davez Mar 1 at 19:19
@Davez Welcome to Server Fault. If you solved your own problem, you should post it as an Answer (it's OK to answer your own question). – Michael Hampton Mar 1 at 22:59
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