Bug: story_arc_credits (HTTP 500)

There appears to be a server bug when retrieving the story_arc_credits field of certain characters. On characters like Wolverine (4005-1440), even when you only attempt to retrieve just the story_arc_credits field, the server churns for about 35 seconds and then returns HTTP 500. Most other characters entries do not have this problem but it seems that popular characters like Wolverine or Cyclops (4005-1459) tend to trigger this bug.

If I were to take a guess, I would suspect that the web process providing the API is hitting it's memory limit. It appears that Comic Vine is running off of PHP/5.4.11 which means that it's per process memory limit is 128M by default. If the 500 errors are indeed due to memory, then increasing this limit or restructuring the database query could help fix the problem.

Here is a query that reliably reproduces the bug (happens on both production and beta):

http://www.comicvine.com/api/character/4005-1459/?api_key=<your API key>&format=json&field_list=story_arc_credits

Thanks, we have a rewrite of our api in the works which removes a bunch of these issues (the API was built against a smaller data set initially and thus doesn't scale as well moving forward).