Does anyone have any idea why Apache would stop serving images?

I run a couple of websites, and one of my medium volume sites is no longer having it's images served. If you go to any page on the site with more than one or two images, you'll get "blank" images.

If you refresh the screen a few times you can usually get the rest of the images to load - however even this behavior is not consistent.

Many complaints have come in from many different users. I've been able to recreate this from a number of different computers using a number of different browsers and on different networks.

I can't get the attention of the hosting company to even answer my queries on this one. I'll be moving the site to another provider soon, but it has an active forum and other interactive features so it's a pain to move.

Any ideas on correcting the problem?

If you want to see it in action, visit http://www.wcha.org/toc.hml and I suspect you will not get more than one or two of the images loaded the first time.

-t

1. If you have access to your error logs, look at

tail -n 100 httpd-error.log

2. Try this as an experiment - put in the full relative path to the image. Instead of:

img src="images/classifieds.gif"

use:

img src="/images/classifieds.gif"

Assuming that 'images' is a directory in the upper most level of your web root directory. Just change one and see if it helps.

Nothing in the error logs. It's a CPANEL system and I only have access to the error log though the control panel listing, so it's possible that there is something in there I can't see since it's not identified as being from my virtual server and so not included.

I've changed a couple of image paths as suggested with no apparent difference.

If you refresh, more and more images are steadily displayed. It's almost like the web server is out of some system resource or something.

-t

I found the raw logs with a little poking around on the system. I think found the error, but I'm not sure what it means yet.

[Tue Jun 18 09:23:00 2002] [warn] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] www.wcha.org policy Volume limit of 4 exceeded, 12

I'll do more digging, but this looks very suspicous.

-t

Hey... there's a reason why checking the logs is always the first advice to give... ;)

I suspect you'll be able to sort this out with your provider now.

I'm disappointed that the CPANEL log display did not show this. I was lucky to be able to locate the unfiltered log file for the server. In a properly configured server, I probably would not have been able to locate and read this file from the shell prompt...

-t

It does seem like a weird problem. When I load up a page with images all I see is the empty holder with a "X". But when I click refesh a few times the images load up. Pretty random behaviour.

Nothing looks out of place in the html.

Thanks to those of you who replied.

It turns out that this message is what you get when Bandwidth Throttling is enabled.

My server was throttling bandwidth at 4k/second. My site was trying to serve bandwidth at 8-12k/second.

It turns out by looking back through the error log, the server used to have throttling set at 50, and then was set to 4 on June 18th. Amazingly all my problems started on June 18th...

My host has increased this to 30k/second, so my site is again happy.

-t