
Why does this site return status 500 but still work? - theSage
http://ststephens.edu/
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patio11
RFC 2616: For 5xx error codes, _User agents SHOULD display any included entity
to the user._ If your server serves up HTML on a 500, it should get rendered.
This page happens to serve up HTML.

Why? Well, the server administrators would have a better idea after
investigating than I do.

If I were playing the percentages, I'd guess "a poorly coded WordPress plugin
is causing rendering the index page to time out _after_ all content has been
sent down the pipe; Apache then terminates the connection with a 500 error and
sends down all the content it buffered locally prior to the timeout, which in
this case happens to be everything."

Circumstantial evidence: no errors on rendering static resources even though
they appear to go through the same server. Other dynamic pages show very long
time to first byte but sporadically give HTTP 200s; I'm assuming that they
render completely and return control before Apache times out the PHP.

