Why would file uploads stop on busy LAMP server?

Question

We have a lamp server that is fairly busy, the CPU usage hovers around 90% at peak times. We are having an intermittent problem where file uploads from web forms fail. It only seems to happen with larger files (over a mb) and it seems to affect some users more than others. We've gone through and checked the obvious stuff like PHP ini max upload sizes, execution times, and folder write permissions. Also, the site worked for a year without trouble like this and it suddenly began (we don't think any of our application php would cause this).

We've watched what happens in Charles Proxy and it shows the upload happening (the sent filesize increases regularly) until it just stops sending data. The browser just shows it's spinning progress like it's proceeding but you can wait 20 minutes and nothing will happen or it reports a timeout.

Does anyone know why an upload might fail intermittently? My only guess is that maybe it has to do with server traffic, like apache is closing that connection prematurely.

Answer 1

If the load on the server is high, then your scripts may be timing out while trying to upload the file. Can you give any more specifics on your problem? I think PHP scripts have a 30 second timeout by default, meaning that if the script has not completed i.e. uploading the file within that time frame then the script will timeout and the upload will fail.

It seems like if the site worked for over a year, and now traffic has grown to the point where it is starting to strain the load on the server then it is possible that scripts may be timing out given the increased traffic and load on the server.