[thelist] strange problem, server timeout randomly for a particular user upon submitting

张韡武 zhangweiwu at realss.com
Thu Jun 22 21:50:23 CDT 2006


Hello. In the web application I am working on, the customer (the buyer)
always complain about this situation:
     1. she sits in the office, open the web application with Firefox;
     2. she opens a form, fill in a lot of data, press 'submit';
     3. she waits there, and wait;
     4. she get an error message that she describe as 'connection time
        out, server takes too long to respond';
     5. [1-4] happens almost half of the times she tries to submit
        something.

Her network is very fast (tested download speed is 1.2Mbps), reacts fast
(click-and-open-immediately), computer is good, her daily job is to fill
these forms. The situation she described never happen in my office
(Xiamen), she is far away and recently I cannot fly to her to check
this.

When she clicks submit, she watch the progress bar on firefox
lower-right corner:
      * if the progress bar has no progress, a.k.a. in gray color, then
        the browser shows it's busy, after less then one minute, show up
        error message
      * if the progress bar shows even only a little bit of progress,
        a.k.a. a little bit blue bar, she konws that this submit will be
        successful. The submit always successful in this case.

She also explained if the submit fail, the data may have already
processed by the server, or may not. She check it by enter the webapp
again to check if the data she submitted is there. Sometimes it is
there, sometimes not.

I am completely puzzled, what can be the cause? When she failed submit,
at that very moment I check server log and everything looks normal (php,
apache log). If I suggest her to make timeout setting longer, would it
be of any effect?

I wish to suggest her to use another computer for a while to help detect
this, which she is trying to do.

Thank you, help really appreciated:)




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