500 Error, fast-cgi.exe, Wordpress 3.8.1

Help with WordPress
#1

Good day,

I come to you professionals for some guidance and help.

I am currently hosting a website / sharing blog for the community of Doctors and clinicians in my city to share ideas and news. (news stories, pictures, videos etc)

I am hosting it on a Windows 2008 R2 server running IIS 7.5, WordPress 3.8.1 and I am getting occasional and very frustrating 500 errors relating to fast cgi. At first I thought it was the W3 Total cache addon causing wincache errors but i have turned that off and it still gives me the errors.

The errors are totally random at various times and days. Some times I get 4 on a row, sometimes I go weeks without getting them. At first they were a nuisance but now they’re hindering the actual function of the website.

I have tried everything except a Linux / Apache server to get this going reliably.

I humbly ask for your assistance in getting this going reliably as it is a very excellent source of knowledge and sharing of advice to my colleagues and friends in the community.

Any help would be appreciated.

Dr. Gary Z. Bie

#2

If I may ask, why would you want to be using Windows Server? I can almost guarantee if you were on linux all your problems would go away, the sky would be blue’r, the clouds would be puffier and there would be world peace.

#3

In my previous profession, I was an IT Admin and had some MCSE certifications (which have probably elapsed by now), so things are familiar for me, as well as Windows Server 2008R2 came with the Dell Poweredge server that I purchased for this use. I am more familiar and comfortable using Windows and IIS.

Although if world peace would be achived… ;D

#4

Can you supply a sample of your database along with all the code your using? I will take a look at it for you. I originally was an Access programmer.

#5

After consulting with the posting community, they would not like me to release any data relating to the website due to data sensitivity and privacy concerns. But I can give you some records of the errors.

This error happens quite often on the server and is always associated with the site giving the error.

Faulting application name: php-cgi.exe, version: 5.4.24.0, time stamp: 0x52cdde63
Faulting module name: kernel32.dll, version: 6.1.7601.18229, time stamp: 0x51fb1115
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0001136d
Faulting process id: 0x12b0
Faulting application start time: 0x01cf46a7f93b4a75
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.4\php-cgi.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\syswow64\kernel32.dll
Report Id: 381d4609-b29b-11e3-90be-000c29be655b

I have also tried PHP v5.3 and getting the same error.

Once the server does error out, this is the screen it gives.

fastcgi500error.png
fastcgi500error.png714×193 32.1 KB

#6

Are you using WinCache for PHP? I had similar issues and finally just removed WinCache and everything was happy again.

#7

I thought the problem was with wincache. So i changed the page cache in my W3 Total Cache Plug-in from wincache to Disk Basic and I was still getting the same error.

#8

Turn off all non native iis caching and see what happens.

#9

OK. disabled all caching except native IIS caching, we’ll see if it crashes or not.

Thank you for the help.

#10

When it happens again, check the Windows Event Viewer (Start, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer) I can’t remember what section it comes under, but you can narrow it down by the “In the last hour” where you should only see a few one of them being the 500 error.

If you post back what that error says, we’ll be able to diagnose further.

#11

I don’t know what happened but I only saw the first 2 replies when I posted so my reply is irrelevant.

#12

So far so good. 24 hours and no errors. The site runs slower, but error free so far.

#13

With you saying it’s running slow, I had the same problem when I upgraded. Turns out that I couldn’t use localhost as the database host any more. I simply had to change it to 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost and that worked a treat.

#14

I even went back and installed older versions of wincache and wasn’t successful in the past.

http://pecl.php.net/package/WinCache

This is running on 2008 r2 with IIS 7.5 - Now it might work without issue on Windows 2012

#15

Everything is running great so far. No errors whatsoever. Weekends especially Friday and Saturday nights are the busy times for the website in general. So i’m not holding my breath.

The website is loading slower than normal because there is no caching happening and eventually I would like to get caching back on the site to speed up load times.

Any recommendations on what good caching plugins are more stable, or actually work with WordPress? W3 Total Cache is off the list so far.

Thank you for all your help.

  • Gary
#16

I haven’t found any, I just use the native IIS cacheing. You can control the IIS Cache to, you should look into it.

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