503 Error page being presented when it should be a 404 error

[julianne49]

Hello all!! I desperately need help. I am a novice Magento user & it's getting the best of me. Here’s what has & is happening. I relaunched my website in December with a new theme. I did something (still am not sure what) & the entire site became a giant 503 error. Whatever I did caused Magento to add a bunch of craziness to the end of every page URL which resulted in pages that don’t exist on my site being indexed by Google as  503 errors.  The weird thing is that you can currently makeup & add anything to the URL of my site after the “.com” & you will get a 503 vs. a 404 error. I would like to get Magento to correctly display the 404 error page instead of a 503 but can’t figure out how. Here is one of the error reports:

a:5:{i:0;s:52:"Front controller reached 100 router match iterations";i:1;s:421:"#0 /public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php(179): Mage::throwException('Front controlle...')
#1 /public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/App.php(365): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Front->dispatch()
#2 /public_html/app/Mage.php(683): Mage_Core_Model_App->run(Array)
#3 /public_html/index.php(83): Mage::run('', 'store')
#4 {main}";s:3:"url";s:12:"/sdfsdfsdfds";s:11:"script_name";s:10:"/index.php";s:4:"skin";s:7:"default";}

Any ideas/suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

[sherrie]

Hi @julianne49, if you're getting a 503 error, it means there is a maintenance.flag in your root Magento directory. Make sure you backup your site, and then remove the file.

[julianne49]

Hello Sherrie & THANK you for your reply. (I've posted things before - no one's ever replied) However, there is no maintenance.flag file in the root directory. The site is up & running - it just will not serve the 404 error page when a person or google enters a non-existent url for the site. It only shows the 503 error page. For example: www.dvineinspiration.com/sfsfsf1223456 is not a page on the site. If you entered this or any madeup combination after ".com" you will be greeted with the 503 error page instead of the 404 - this page does not exist.  Any further thoughts/suggestions - are welcomed!

[sherrie · Accepted solution]

Hi @julianne49, sorry to hear you haven't received a reply before - if you're still waiting on any other threads, please feel free to PM them to me and I'll try to follow up.

As for this one, I thought you were getting the infamous 503 maintenance error, but given your code snippet (thanks for sharing that) it looks like this is actually a routing error.

Previously someone with a similar issue found that their system was trying to load a wrong no_route path. They resolved this by running a sql query, but it looks like you might also be able to resolve by checking the value in your admin under System > Configurations > Web > Default Pages.

Here's where I found others chatting about this error: http://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/101866/404-page-front-controller-reached-100-router-match...

Please don't forget to report back and let me know if that resolves the issue for you, and if so what specifically fixed it. Good luck!

[julianne49]

Thanks a million - it was the url path.

[sherrie]

Awesome, glad to hear that resolved it for you @julianne49!