Question

I'm currently experiencing a problem where the TWiki, very intermittently (twice in 2 days, and the only times I've noticed this since I began hosting the TWiki a few months back) has failed to save a topic. What's worse, instead of just failing, it replaces all three related files (.txt, .txt,v, and .lock) with blank (0-byte) files. It then displays the Topic, but in the place of the Topic content, there is only a long string of exclamation points.

The installation is nonstandard in one way - I'm using SpeedyCGI (http://daemoninc.com/SpeedyCGI/) to improve performance on the TWiki (it's heavily loaded). When I kill SpeedyCGI's background processes, the behavior changes a bit (the exclamation points are replaced by nothing) but the problem remains for some length of time before it seems to disappear by itself and saving works as normal again, though at that point the history is lost.

I can't reproduce the problem and there doesn't seem to be any obvious pattern about it, but the nature of the problem leads me to think it might have to do with the number of open file handles, maybe exacerbated by the fact that SpeedyCGI maintains the Perl process over many requests. Because of the number of customizations, I'm hesitant to upgrade to the most recent release, and am unsure of whether or not that would actually have an affect. Also, because of the need for performance, I'm hesistant to remove SpeedyCGI from the mix. You might note a few non-standard Plugins - I don't believe they're involved, as both affect only the "view" functionality (only implement the handleCommonTags call) (as an aside, after some more documentation, some of them will be made public).

Has anyone else ever experienced this before? Also, has anyone else used SpeedyCGI with TWiki, either successfully or unsuccessfully? Lastly, is there any known problem with the 05-07-2004 TWiki Release that might cause a problem of this form?

Thanks everyone.

Environment

-- OrrBernstein - 02 Nov 2004

Answer

That's a long topic name!

I'd like to rename it to TopicsRemovedIntermittentlyWhileSaving if you don't mind. I'll give you a chance to read this first so you know where it's going. Let me know when you have and I'll do the renaming.

-- SamHasler - 03 Nov 2004

Sure thing. As an aside, however, do you know what's causing my problem? Thanks.

-- OrrBernstein - 05 Nov 2004

Renamed the topic. I've also pointed the references to SpeedyCGI at the topic in Codev.

Could your problem be the result of TWikiOnApache2dot0Hangs?

-- SamHasler - 05 Nov 2004