Help needed - phpmyadmin/ssh/nginx troubles

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@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@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@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.