Re: PHP/Apache or IE problem (no GPC data)



Juha Suni wrote: 
Wolter Kamphuis wrote:

Hi all,

I've got a question, not really about PHP but this is the best
audience. Is anybody aware of problems with Internet Explorer not
sending any get/post/cookie data?

I'm the webmaster of a large webbased administration package. Recently
we get complaints from our customers about them losing their session.
After adding extra debugging code we see that a small number of apache
requests provide no GET, POST or COOKIE data. This happens about 10 to
20 times per 200k hits (one day's work per server).



I'm guessing that this is a Internet Explorer problem, maybe caching
related?


Not to sound arrogant, but since it's hard to delve deeper without much more details, I'd just like to make sure the reason is not the most obvious one. If you're clients are losing their sessions, are you sure its not just because of their sessions timing out and hence the cookie-data or the actual session data on the server being lost?

I've just seen many posts recently about sessions and their too-early timeouts which are usually the result of misconfigured php settings and/or too active garbage collection.

What are your session timeouts and the cookie timeouts?

After three weeks of debugging I found the problem, we misconfigured apache on our servers. The problems seems to be this bug in IE, see http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=305217. We found the solution at http://www.modssl.org/docs/2.8/ssl_faq.html#ToC49.

I've done everything to debug our PHP session code, I just knew it worked flawless. Still I saw http hits without any get/post/cookie data, no PHPSESSID whatsoever. I couldn't explain this so I asked here.

Anway, I glad to report our problems are gone. We've done over 2M hits today without a single lost PHP session. Apache is running with keepalive off, a bit harder for our servers but that's no a problem.

Wolter Kamphuis
.

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