Debugging

"The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later." this is the most common error encountered by a Drupal developer. Usually, errors are logged by Drupal and the logs can be accessed from Admin->Reports->Recent log messages. But when you get "The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later." you cannot even access the reports dashboard.

Debugging is a process of finding and reducing the number of bugs. In the web applications development we used to work mostly on the development site at first and debug the errors then we will go for the live site to just push the modifications which we made in the development site. In such cases there may be a chance of error occurrence in the live site even if we come up from the development site. Then we have to handle the debugging process in the live site at that point of time. In the development site process we can do the debugging process easily, there is no need to worry about the customers since because it is not viewable to the customers. But when it comes to the live site we have to consider about the customers who visit the site.

We had recently faced an issue in one of our client's website running on Drupal 5. The site had crashed and we were unable to continue development. We began analyzing the problem by checking the free space on the site and came to the conclusion that the now deprecated PHP Ereg function was causing the site to crash. If you are facing the same issue in one of your Drupal sites, read on to know how we successfully fixed the bug.