Question

Our installation works great, except randomly, when trying to navigate to a link within the TWiki, the process simply hangs. The progress bar slowly increases to 38% and stops there. It stops at 38% each and every time.

While this is happening, a 'ps -ef' shows no processes being run by TWiki. This happens the most when using the preview and save functions, but can happen when just trying to view pages.

If you click 'Go' again on the toolbar, or click focus into the Address text box and hit the Enter key, the page loads every time.

Each line of the access.log for apache looks like this:

10.201.252.116 - StevenHajducko [23/Dec/2004:10:26:01 -0800] "GET /bin/view/TWiki/WebTopicList HTTP/1.1" 200 20909
10.201.252.116 - - [23/Dec/2004:10:26:02 -0800] "GET /bin/view/TWiki/%USERLAYOUTURL% HTTP/1.1" 400 304
10.201.252.116 - - [23/Dec/2004:10:26:02 -0800] "GET /bin/view/TWiki/%USERSTYLEURL% HTTP/1.1" 400 304

Is this usual to see the last two GET statements?

Not sure if this is an apache issue or twiki issue.

The testenv output is as follows:

Test the environment for TWiki
Please read the TWikiInstallationNotes for more information on TWiki installation.
Environment variables:
DOCUMENT_ROOT /opt/www/twiki/
GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1 
HTTP_ACCEPT image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, */* 
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING gzip, deflate 
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE en-us 
HTTP_CONNECTION Keep-Alive 
HTTP_HOST plague.diginsite.com 
HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 
PATH /usr/kerberos/sbin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/root/bin 
QUERY_STRING  
REMOTE_ADDR 10.201.252.116 
REMOTE_PORT 1479 
REQUEST_METHOD GET 
REQUEST_URI /bin/testenv 
SCRIPT_FILENAME /opt/www/twiki/bin/testenv 
SCRIPT_NAME /bin/testenv 
SERVER_ADDR 10.201.8.31 
SERVER_ADMIN steven.hajducko@digitalinsight.com 
SERVER_NAME plague.diginsite.com 
SERVER_PORT 80 
SERVER_PROTOCOL HTTP/1.1 
SERVER_SIGNATURE Apache/1.3.33 Server at plague.diginsite.com Port 80 
SERVER_SOFTWARE Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) 
UNIQUE_ID Qcn0CH8AAAEAAF86Afo 

CGI Setup:
Operating system: Unix (linux) 
Perl version: 5.8.0 
@INC library path: /opt/www/twiki/lib
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl
/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi
/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.0
/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0
. 
 Note: This is the Perl library path, used to load TWiki modules, third-party modules used by some plugins, and Perl built-in modules. 
TWiki module in @INC path:  
 OK, TWiki.pm found (TWiki version: 02 Sep 2004 $Rev: 1742 $) 
Required Perl modules:  
 CGI (3.05) 
 CGI::Carp (1.28) 
 File::Copy (2.05) 
 File::Spec (0.83) 
 FileHandle (2.01) 
Optional Perl modules:  
 Algorithm::Diff (1.02) 
 MIME::Base64 (2.12) 
 POSIX (1.05) 
 Encode (1.83) 
 Note: Optional module 'Unicode::MapUTF8' not installed - check TWiki documentation to see if your configuration needs this module.  
 Note: Optional module 'Unicode::Map' not installed - check TWiki documentation to see if your configuration needs this module.  
 Note: Optional module 'Unicode::Map8' not installed - check TWiki documentation to see if your configuration needs this module.  
 Note: Optional module 'Jcode' not installed - check TWiki documentation to see if your configuration needs this module.  
 Digest::MD5 (2.20) 
 Note: Optional module 'Digest::SHA1' not installed - check TWiki documentation to see if your configuration needs this module.  
 MIME::Base64 (2.12) 
 Net::SMTP (2.24) 
PATH_INFO:  
 Note: For a URL such as http://plague.diginsite.com/bin/testenv/foo/bar, the correct PATH_INFO is /foo/bar, without any prefixed path components. Test this now - particularly if you are using mod_perl, Apache or IIS, or are using a web hosting provider. The page resulting from the test link should have a PATH_INFO of /foo/bar.  
mod_perl: Not used for this script (mod_perl not loaded into Apache)  
User: apache  
 Note: Your CGI scripts are executing as this user. 
 Warning: Since your CGI script is not running as user nobody, you need to change the locks in the *,v RCS files of the TWiki distribution from nobody to apache. Otherwise, changes to topics will not be logged by RCS.  
 Fix: If needed, relock all the rcs files to user apache 
Group(s): www www 

Test of TWiki.cfg Configuration:
$defaultUrlHost: http://plague.diginsite.com 
 Note: This must match the protocol and host part (with optional port number) of the TWiki URL. 
$scriptUrlPath: /bin 
 Note: This must match the 'cgi-bin' part of the URL used to access the TWiki cgi-bin directory. 
$pubUrlPath: /pub 
 Note: This must be the URL of the public directory.This is not set correctly if the /pub/wikiHome.gif image below is broken:
 
$pubDir: /opt/www/twiki/pub 
 Note: This is the public directory, as seen from the file system. It must correspond to $pubUrlPath. 
$templateDir: /opt/www/twiki/templates 
 Note: This is the TWiki template directory, as seen from the file system.  
$dataDir: /opt/www/twiki/data 
 Note: This is the data directory where TWiki stores all topics. 
$mailProgram: /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -oi -oeq 
 Note: This is the mail program TWiki uses to send mail. 
$rcsDir: /usr/local/bin 
 Note: This is the directory where RCS is located. 
RCS Version: 5.7 
 Note: This is the version of RCS which will be used. 
$lsCmd: /bin/ls 
 Note: This is the file list program TWiki uses to list topics. 
$egrepCmd: /bin/egrep 
 Note: This is a program TWiki uses for search. 
$fgrepCmd: /bin/fgrep 
 Note: This is a program TWiki uses for search. 
$safeEnvPath: /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin 
 Note: This is used to initialise the PATH variable, and is used to run the 'diff' program used by RCS, as well as to run shell programs such as Bourne shell or 'bash'. 

Path and Shell Environment
Original PATH: /usr/kerberos/sbin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/root/bin 
 Note: This is the PATH value passed in from the web server to this script - it is reset by TWiki scripts to the PATH below, and is provided here for comparison purposes only.  
Current PATH: /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin 
 Note: This is the actual PATH setting that will be used by Perl to run programs. It is normally identical to $safeEnvPath, unless that variable is empty.  
diff: GNU diff was found on the PATH - this is the recommended diff tool. 
 Note: The 'diff' command is used by RCS to compare files.  

User Authentication
htpasswd Format Family: htpasswd 
htpasswd Encoding: crypt 
htpasswd Filename: /opt/www/twiki/data/.htpasswd 
 Note: only some combinations of Format, Encoding and Filename are valid, and fewer are tested  

Environment

-- StevenHajducko - 22 Dec 2004

Answer

Nevermind. This is being covered in the UnresolvedVarsInURL topic.

-- StevenHajducko - 23 Dec 2004

Steven, does the "stop at 38%" symtpom only occur with IE?

I ask 'cause if WhatsWrongIE, which is an earlier version of the unresolved urls topic.

-- MattWilkie - 23 Dec 2004

Haven't been able to test any other browsers at the moment, so I'm not sure.

However, I don't experience the issue only with saving topics. Viewing topics can cause the issue as well and switching off of PatternSkin to DragonSkin seems to have remedied the problem.

-- StevenHajducko - 27 Dec 2004

The hanging definetly only happens with IE. I tried out Firefox and had no issues.

-- StevenHajducko - 28 Dec 2004

thanks for confirming Steven. I'm not sure where to go from here since we are seeing similar behaviour across two major apache versions. I guess now it's time to start looking at perl 5.8 (?). When I get back to work on the 4rth I'll check and see if we are also using RH9, I suspect we are.

-- MattWilkie - 30 Dec 2004

No problem Matt. One thing however, I did use the suggested fix for the USERSTYLEURL and USERLAYOUTURL and I haven't experienced problems as of yet.

As an example, I could usually generate the hang within 5 minutes by just clicking random links. However, since implementing those into the TWikiPreferences and creating a blank empty.css, I haven't had an issue with Firefox or IE ( yet ). I'll keep you up to date on that in case that changes.

-- StevenHajducko - 30 Dec 2004

Has anyone tried turning off HTTP pipelining in IE? Some proxies, e.g. privoxy, will force this to be turned off. Just an idea...

-- RichardDonkin - 01 Jan 2005

I'll give it a shot, how does one turn off HTTP pipelining in IE?

-- MattWilkie - 01 Jan 2005