Help needed - phpmyadmin/ssh/nginx troubles.

[Ian Hobson]

Hi All,

I have a very strange problem.  I link through to my VPS using SSH - and 
all works fast and reliably except for phpmyadmin.
The terminal works fine. I've removed the local firewall at this end 
(and it made no difference).
Other sites work fine for me over SSH which narrows the search down 
further.
Other sites work fine for other people coming in to the server using SSH.
Most of my 8 sites use php, so the problem is unlikely to be PHP.

The main symptom is that GET using PHPMyAdmin are rather unreliable. 
When the work, the reply is < 2 secs. When they don't I get no reply. 
30% of GET requests work, 70% fail.  With POSTs it is another story.  
95%+  of POSTS fail.

Checking the MySQL log it appears that the break is in the send part 
(browser -> nginx -> php -> phpMysql -> MySQL).  There is no problem 
getting back. If MySQL logs anything, I get a reply.

I have never had a part transaction. It either fails totally (with no 
error message or log entry I can find) or it succeeds quickly.

The config is....

ian at ianhobson/etc/nginx/sites-available $ cat phpmyadmin
#  server for phpmyadmin
server {
     listen 127.0.0.1:80;
     server_name localhost phpmyadmin ;
     root /home/ian/websites/example;
     index index.htm index.html index.php;
     fastcgi_index  index.php;
     location ^~ /phpmyadmin/ {
        root /usr/share;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
     }
     location ~ \.php$ {
       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
       include  /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    }
}

ian at ianhobson/etc/nginx/sites-available $ cat default
# Statements for default virtual host
server {
     listen   80 default ;
     #
     server_name 212.13.194.210 ;
     root /home/ian/websites/default;
     index index.htm;
     access_log /var/www/access_log;

}
ian at ianhobson/etc/nginx/sites-available $

Default shown to show it can't pick up the domain "localhost".  I am 
using it on address  http://localhost:8080/phpmyadmin.index.php   This 
was tunnelled through to  127.0.0.1:80.  I have also tried tunnelling 
to  localhost:80 - neither works reliably.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going wrong?  OR even what to 
look for?

Regards

Ian

p.s. 6 months ago it used to work much better, with only an occasional 
glitches. Sonce then it has got steadily worse and worse.