Help needed. - XML.php IM action gone haywire and won't stop.

Hello all,

My Dolphin 7.0.6 site had been running fine for many months and yesterday it started loading at a very slow speed, throwing 500 errors, loading half a site, etc. I looked at my cpanel server stats and found that I was using the max server memory, cpu, and processes allowed. When I checked the running processes, I found the /flash/XML.php to be most of those processes. I disabled /flash/XML.php and found that server useage drops back to normal and the site runs fast but of course with no flash apps. When I enable /flash/XML.php it immediately jumps back to maxing out the server.

In trouble shooting, I found that when I enable /flash/XML.php and then go and check the stats for the last 300 files accessed, I see it completely filled with listings like this - /flash/XML.php?module=im&action=updateInvite&recipient=731&_t=1307287484386 - all the same /flash/XML.php?module=im&action=updateInvite&recipient with different recipent numbers for each listing. If I refresh the page the the 300 are still the invite but with new numbers.

It seems as if the IM module invite task has got stuck in loop of something. so as soon as I enable the /flash/XML.php hundreds and hundreds of /flash/XML.php?module=im&action=updateInvite&recipient= start running basically crash the site. I checked the database and found a pending IM database table and emptied it but that didn't help. Does anyone know what I could try to fix this?

Thank you

ah she strikes again the /flash/XML.php

what you are seeing there is a query to the database. this has been discussed in this forum several times, and was explained that what you are seeing is a query looking for updates to display. the database is queried every ^nth/second

so if you have 1000 members, it will query those thousand members profiles looking for updates. somewhere in this forum, there was some discussion on how to tune the time increment. AlexT was the one who provided the answer.

Thank you for your reply DosDawg. I'll look for AlexT's post. I just can't figure out why now after not having a problem with it in the past. It was fine for a year and one morning it is crashing the server. This happened literally over night.

I did see the post about setting the update interval for the simple messenger there does not seem to be anywhere to change the update for the IM. In the flash aps settings when you mouse over the update interval ? mark, it says that it applies to simple messenger only even though it is in the set up for the IM.

Thanks.

yeah that XML.php file has been a nuisance for a long time. is the exact reason i had to abort shared hosting. there was no way to run dolphin in a shared environment because you would see the XML.php file just hammer the CPU.

and when i say hammer, i mean in excess of 70% Usage on a CPU 2.57Ghz, and there was never any explanation for what it was doing that.

 was this what your referring to?

http://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/Actions-Popup-Speed.htm

http://www.boonex.com/n/Dolphin_7_x_Resource_Hog_xml_file_and_a_few_more

http://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/flash-XML-php-was-taking-more-than-500-CPU.htm

http://www.boonex.com/n/xml_php_resource_hog_confirmed_

http://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/XML-php-spiking-CPU-Resources.htm

so as you can clearly see, this has been an ongoing situation. one that is not really being addressed and only pointed out that your server configuration is inadequate per AlexT. so everybody who was seeing this issue has a misconfigured server. though no indication on what needed to be changed on the server is provided. and the reference that xml.php can use 'a lot' of resources is indicated.

though this was reported by some of the top debuggers of this application, nothing has been provided from the responsible party here.

there is a changest referenced on the last link, where you can change the incremental time in which it will update.

The thing that is so damn frustrating is that there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason with this. You can see in that last link posted by DosDawg that I had an issue with my host shutting down my site in November 2010 for the spiking XML.php. I cleared my Caches, optimized my database and asked them to give it a try an hour later and all was great for seven months without issue. Then Bam! Yesterday morning XML.php starts crashing the server again and only this time, I can't get it to stop after two days. Which is why this time I've had to dig deeper and see that it is the IM invite update function causing the problem in my particular case.

No changes to my server,  no changes to my site, no mods added, no influx of new members.

Something is dreadfully wrong here.