“Service Unavailable”

What do your web server error logs say? Offhand I can’t think of what could cause that, but any 503 errors should be documented in the error logs.

Not sure what system you’re running, but on linux here are some common examples:
apache/ubuntu: /var/log/apache2/error.log
apache/rhel: /var/log/httpd/error_log
nginx/ubuntu: /var/log/nginx/error.log

Is your CAS server set to allow requests from your staging environment?

Our CAS is set up to allow requests from this environment. Everything is working properly on our development environment, which is on the same server. I will work on getting those error logs and posting them next.

Thank you.

Here is what we believe to be the issue. When we try to get to the Authorizer network settings on our Staging Environment we get a message saying “Service Unavailable – The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later”.

We have almost 2,000 users on this environment (we are using this on a gigantic multi-site, University-wide website), a lot more than we do on our Development Environment. The Development Environment was still very slow to pull up the network settings page, but with the extra few hundred users on the Staging Environment, it’s just too much for the app as it stands.

We believe that because we’re not getting any errors reported, that the list of users, plus the external user source (possible LDAP users) is simply causing Authorizer to time out.

Do you have any thoughts or possible fixes for this if this is the case?

Thank you.

-Chris

We have sites with 5,000+ approved users loading before we implemented paging on the approved user lists; it took around 10 seconds I think. Perhaps your load balancer has an artificially low timeout? Maybe try increasing the timeout on the load balancer and see if you can get the page to load.

Quick question–are your 2,000 users network-approved users? I just realized we didn’t implement paging on network-approved users, only on approved users on each of the sub sites. In our user cases, we only use network-approved users for admins (so there’s only a few on all our sites).

Yes. All of those 2,000 users are approved. They are all allowed to login to their appropriate subsites (most with access to multiple sites). We have a dozen super-admins with access to everything.

-Chris

Is there a quick fix that we can add to our version of the plugin that can then be placed in future official updates? We would love to keep Authorizer, but this is prohibiting us from moving forward with it. Thank you in advance!

-Chris

Just checking on any updates. This is a really important plugin that we would like to implement as soon as possible. We like what we’ve seen of it so far, and still want to use Authorizer, but this last bit is causing a delay for us.

Thank you in advance.

-Chris

Hi @cross33, apologize for the lag time in response.

If you have not already done so, please try unchecking the “Show Dashboard Widget” option under the Advanced tab in the Authorizer settings; this may improve functionality.

You may also want to alter the php.ini settings on the server to allow for longer execution time; by default, processes will time out if they take longer than this, and it is 30 seconds by default. Please see https://php.net/manual/en/info.configuration.php#ini.max-execution-time

To further help understand where the breakdown is, can you take a screenshot of each step that you go through, and where the error message occurs? I understand that this may be redundant, but it may help resolve the issue.

Thanks!

FYI the upcoming version of Authorizer (2.8.0) now fully supports paging in the Network approved user list (we couldn’t tell from your description if this was related to your problems, but it may help). Should be out next week.

Also, here are some performance tweaks for web servers that we’ve had to adjust to support 5000+ users in Authorizer. Note that this is out of scope for the plugin itself, but we’re offering them here to help sysadmins configure server resources to support large userbases in Authorizer.

* MySQL: max_allowed_packet
Default is 1mb; if the Authorizer approved list is larger, its row in the wp_options table can grow beyond 1mb. We recommend setting it to 10mb in mysql global settings.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8062496/how-to-change-max-allowed-packet-size

* PHP settings (php.ini):
memory_limit: if you have enough server resources, set to 256M or 512M.
max_execution_time: set to 60 (seconds) or greater.

* Reverse proxy: check for any short timeouts (30 seconds or less) that may be reached before the backend can finish processing.