[VuFind-Tech] elusive 'malformed response' error

[anna h. <an...@gm...>]

Hi all,

Vufind 1.3! the past two tuesday nights we've had periods of displaying
malformed response errors instead of record pages due to recent server
problems at Syndetics. I went in to try to improve error handling but it
looks like everything is being handled correctly. It seems like the error
we're getting is quitting out before it gets a chance to reach the error
handling. stacktrace below -- any insights?

Relatedly, how does the following code work given that sendRequest has no
return statement? Won't $http always be null?

web/sys/Excerpts.php line 161:
if (PEAR::isError($http = $client->sendRequest(true))) {
              return $http;
          }

Thanks!!
Anna

Apr 15 22:30:39 vufind [error] [pear_error: message="Malformed response"
code=16 mode=callback callback=handlePEARError prefix="" info=""]
Backtrace:
/usr/share/pear/PEAR.php line 533 - class = PEAR_Error, function =
PEAR_Error
/usr/share/pear/HTTP/Request.php line 1225 - class = PEAR, function =
raiseError
/usr/share/pear/HTTP/Request.php line 753 - class = HTTP_Response, function
= process
/usr/local/vufind_trico_1.3/web/sys/Proxy_Request.php line 110 - class =
HTTP_Request, function = sendRequest
/usr/local/vufind_trico_1.3/web/sys/Excerpts.php line 161 - class =
Proxy_Request, function = sendRequest
/usr/local/vufind_trico_1.3/web/sys/Excerpts.php line 246 - class =
ExternalExcerpts, function = _syndetics
/usr/local/vufind_trico_1.3/web/sys/Excerpts.php line 78 - class =
ExternalExcerpts, function = _syndeticsplus
/usr/local/vufind_trico_1.3/web/RecordDrivers/IndexRecord.php line 385 -
class = ExternalExcerpts, function = __construct
/usr/local/vufind_trico_1.3/web/RecordDrivers/IndexRecord.php line 961 -
class = IndexRecord, function = getExcerpts
/usr/local/vufind_trico_1.3/web/services/Record/Record.php line 167 - class
= IndexRecord, function = hasExcerpt
/usr/local/vufind_trico_1.3/web/services/Record/Home.php line 57 - class =
Record, function = __construct
/usr/local/vufind_trico_1.3/web/index.php line 212 - class = Home, function
= launch