PHP/Apache or IE problem (no GPC data)

[Wolter Kamphuis]

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).

We also see that every server have their own set of pages who give
problems. Server A has problems with page X and Y and server B has
problems with page Y and Z.

Every servers uses the same PHP source, latest PHP (4.4.0-pl1-gentoo)
and Apache (2.0.54-r31).

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

Anybody here any tips where to look, I'm pretty much clueless now.

thanks in advance,
Wolter Kamphuis

[Juha Suni]

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?

--
Suni

[Wolter Kamphuis]

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