A new client of ours emailed us and told us that whenever he visits his website, he’s seeing the following error:
The connection was reset.
The above error is displayed when he’s using FireFox. When he uses Chrome, his website also crashes but with the following (different) error:
No data received
Now, we worked on a similar problem before, but the difference is that on this instance, the problem was happening on every page on the frontend and the backend, while previously the problem was only happening in the backend when installing an extension.
So, the first thing that we did was that we disabled, in the configuration.php, gzip compression and FTP (we also removed all the FTP settings), but still, the problem was there.
We then disabled all the plugins and all the modules, and still we we were seeing the same error. That was very odd and we were perplexed – we just didn’t know where to look to find the cause of the problem (since what we were seeing was not a Joomla error, but a browser error).
Luckily, at around the same time the client started experiencing the problem, he received an automatic email from his server warning him that there was some corruption at the database level. That email (which he forwarded to us) unveiled the whole mystery.
You see, the automated email stated that the #__session table has crashed and that the system didn’t try to automatically repair it. So, we logged in to phpMyAdmin, we selected the database powering the Joomla website, and then we clicked on the #__session table, and we saw this message:
Table ‘./[database]/#__session’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired
So, we repaired the table using the following query (of course, we replaced #__ with the database prefix):
REPAIR TABLE `session`
And guess what? That fixed the problem!
But why did a corrupt session table cause this problem instead of just displaying a fatal error?
Honestly, we didn’t investigate the issue very hard in order to know why – but we’re sure that there’s a logical explanation. For now, you’ll just have to trust us that a corrupt session table will cause The Connection Was Reset/No Data Received error.
So, if you have the same problem on your website, try repairing the session table in phpMyAdmin. If that doesn’t work, then try repairing all the tables. If that still doesn’t work, then why not contact us? We’ll solve the problem quickly, cleanly, and for a very reasonable fee!