fatal error, want to avoid

tullmejs

Hi, tonite my web hotel suspended my account, apparantly my script ate server big time. Error log told me
"PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded" at three occasions. The error message points at (i thought innocent) lines like these:

$plist2[$f][8]=trim(substr($text,$gg+62+$f99,3));
$plist2[$f][9]=trim(substr($text,$gg+66+$f99,3));
$plist2[$f][10]=trim(substr($text,$gg+70+$f*99,3));

What way to safeguard against such problems?

chyan

it seems your script consume a lot of processing time
that might happen because you have a lot of data and you try to looping
the command for each data that you have
to solve your problem you must rebuild your query, try to filter the data
you want to process, dont process it all in once time

the other way to solve your problem is to increase Maximum execution time for each script in php config
but to do that you must have access to your server

tullmejs

Thank you, but there is not a lot of data. No database either, actually. Script (normally) finishes in about a second or so. Obviously something, sometimes, goes wrong. Ultimatly, I need to find the actual problem, but I would very much like it to abort before causing server side trouble!

It is, I should have explained, working most of the time. It parses some user submitted text. Probably that text is sometimes not what I or the script assumes. I don't even care to provoke an error, worried about me being thrown out from the web hotel again

Maybe I just need to make all loops safe. I still hope there is a way to generally safeguard against this kind of error though.

Any ideas?

tullmejs

I tried to provoke an error, and did, and pressed STOP in the browser to avoid any harm. I still got the error in the log; now I don't dare to experiment online anymore :-(

tsinka

Hi,

please post the complete script (maybe as attachment).

Thomas

tullmejs

OK, here it is. Be gentle.

Btw, Is exit("why"); a proper way to terminate a script upon unexpected errors? Like in any loop something like

a loop
some code
$t++;
if($t>$quiteTooMuch) exit("bad loop, sucker");
end of loop

edit: .txt wasn't good

laserlight

Is exit("why"); a proper way to terminate a script upon unexpected errors?

Yes, especially when debugging.
Otherwise, it might be better to handle the error more gracefully (though you can still do that with [man]exit/man, or its more common alias, [man]die/man ), perhaps even using [man]set_error_handler/man and [man]trigger_error/man

tullmejs

Good, thank you. Currently, the need for grace is minimal ;-)

Of course I'd like to elliminate errors, or at least handle them gracefully; right now I just want to make sure I won't crash the server. Apart from infinite loops, are there any dangers I should be aware of? * /edit/ I'll ask that in a separate thread.

Again, at this point I don't mind errors, only those errors that make the server admins shut me down, hehe.

tsinka

Hi,

I think it could be an endless loop problem. Please post some example data and explain what you want to do with the data.

Thomas

tullmejs

Thanks all, I think it is best to regard this issue as resolved, even if it technically is not. I posted another topic: "Infinite loops - what else is bad?".

Tsinka, I too think it is an endless loop. I think I can debug it myself, or, at least, ask more specific questions later on.

Since I posted, focus has shifted from the specific problem, that might be rather trivial, to the general question how to keep debugging while not cousing yet more server trouble :-)

Thanks again, indeed!