This is a very strange issue, and I haven't had any luck finding anything in any documentation or web search that even comes close to what I've been seeing. The basic issue is that a couple of the people trying to access my site can't seem to access resources that are past a certain point in my directory structure. They can access resources that are available closer to the root, but are greeted with a timeout when they navigate past a certain point. However, according to access_log, Apache was responding with a 200 and sending back data to the user (though obviously somewhere between Apache saying it's getting sent and the user's browser, something's going wrong). This happened whether the resource being requested was a static file (HTML, JPG, etc.) or dynamic (PHP). Everything up to one directory index would work (a subdirectory of my user's public_html), and the pages linked from there (and anything past it in the directory structure) would be inaccessible to these people.
The server is running Apache 2 (2.2 currently), and has been hosted on Mac OS X and is now on Fedora Core 5.
At first I was running Apache on OS X, and the problem was worse. When I moved to Linux (hoping it was an issue because of slow response time -- my server's a 333MHz PowerPC G3), one user (in Australia) could access the parts of my site that had previously been timing out just fine, and another user (here in the US, several states away) was able to access the same parts, but only intermittently (after browsing for some short amount of time, he would start getting timeouts again until either I manually restarted Apache, or the child processes ended up being restarted and he happened upon a fresh child).
SELinux and iptables are both running, though disabling both didn't seem to change the behavior any. I have virtual hosts currently, but the problem was existing previously with no virtual hosts.
I can't even begin to logically deduce just what might be the problem here. The logs say that Apache's serving the requests fine, so that would seem to remove Apache as a suspect. Timeouts can often be networking issues, though pages closer to the root would be accessible. It doesn't matter what type of content is being requested, so it's not some PHP issue. Since it does seem to depend on the URI being requested (at least in that some work and some don't), it does make me think it's something on my end, and Apache's about the best guess I've got.
I'd be most appreciative for any tips on other things to check on that I've missed, or pointers to documentation that may be of use. I'm sure that it's something simple (it usually is), but at least everything that I've checked so far hasn't really been much use to me so far. I feel like I'm running in circles trying to diagnose this issue, and it's frustrating when I have so few users that I'm catering to and some of them can't access parts of my site.
Thanks much,
-Ian
