SID-01326: Internal Server Error from managing attachments

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:	5.0.1	Perl version:	v5.8.8
Category:	CategoryAttachments	Server OS:	CentOS release 5.5 (Final)	Last update:	13 years ago

A user reported that they were having issues while trying to manage an attachment on a page they authored. The filesize of the attachment in question is 369Kb

The error from the apache error log is as follows:

[Fri Nov 11 08:44:02 2011] [warn] [client 10.9.10.106] Timeout waiting for output from CGI script /var/www/twiki/bin/attach, referer: http://twiki/twiki/bin/view/Documentation/WebHome

[Fri Nov 11 08:44:02 2011] [error] [client 10.9.10.106] Premature end of script headers: attach, referer: http://twiki/twiki/bin/view/Documentation/WebHome

-- JosephDevaney - 2011-11-11

Discussion and Answer

Do small files work properly? If so, increase the Timeout setting in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.

369Kb is not big, your user seems to be on a very slow connection?

-- PeterThoeny - 2011-11-11

User is on the same connection I am inside our network, which isn't slow by any means. It appears to be only this file, while others (both larger and smaller) don't appear to have the same issue.

-- JosephDevaney - 2011-11-14

Very strange. Disk hardware issue? Do you have virus scan going on on the server? Is the timeout repeatable with the same file?

-- PeterThoeny - 2011-11-14

No disk issues that I can see and no virus scanning on the server. Timeout is repeatable with the same file, and to make matters more interesting, I can manage a 6M pdf file but not this 396Kb pdf file.

I did end up raising the timeout for apache to 240 from 120 and I can now load the 396Kb PDF to manage it. The only difference I can see here is that there are 18 revisions of this pdf versus 1 of the 6M file I looked at. I assume its just taking the server this is running on longer to load all the information due to the amount of revision history.

-- JosephDevaney - 2011-11-15

Interesting. Worth investigating how much influence many revisions on an attachment have on upload performance. I know that number of topic revisions have virtually no influence, there are twiki.org topics with over 20,000 revisions.

-- PeterThoeny - 2011-11-15

Closing this question after more than 30 days of inactivity. Feel free to reopen if needed. Consider engaging one of the TWiki consultants if you need timely help. We invite you to get involved with the community, it is more likely you get community support if you support the open source project!

-- PeterThoeny - 2012-01-23

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