Hi all,

If you seem to have browsing problems especially that affect one user and not another it would seem to point to local computer issues than the website/server. We wouldn't rule it out but it seems unlikely with the majority have none or minimal problems.

When you make us aware of a problem please leave the following details.

Operating system, browser (inc version), page you are trying to access, security software specifically firewalls and other internet security software, security settings from the browser and anything else deemed relevant to the problem.

Thanks

Brendan

Ok, I just had a problem.

I was sending a message

http://www.folio32.com/public/account/messages/compose/user_Carolynna/rep_1915/


Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /public/account/messages/compose/user_Carolynna/rep_1915/ on this server.


Browser -
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Running Windows 2000

First time I've had such a problem. 

Hi All,

I have noticed this problem happen periodically while using the site since I joined and tolerated it because it was only an annoyance... until I lost two lengthy mails one after the other this afternoon... argh!!  So, I'm hoping to generate a bit of momentum on this problem and get it fixed for all!

I disagree with the analysis that the problems are local to each user.  It is true that the problem is intermittent, but there are other possibilities.  For one, the error message states that it cannot find the file on the server.  The server being the key word.  The URL is correct and the message is an Apache error, which then disappears after a while.

Being new to the site I don't know if the creators/programmers are still here or how the site was built.  I'm going to take an educated guess at what I think is happening, but it's a complete shot in the dark without knowing more tech info.  If anyone knows more please fill me in.

My guess is this is a database problem.  Possibly due to maximum connections to the DB exceeded or some such random problem.  How did I figure it's a database problem, I hear you ask :)

The URL's that the site uses are called "pretty URLs".  They're pretty because they don't have the very familiar index.php?form=blah&post=moreblah and so on.  Written the pretty way, this might be /form/blah/post/moreblah.  The request from the browser is rewritten by the web server to split out the arguments.

Because the site is dynamic and fully database dependent for all the content, these arguments are going to be translated to a database request.  For example (totally contrived) folio32.com/forum/id_1001 might rewrite to folio32.com/?type=forum&id=1001.  That's going to result in a database request to pull out message id 1001 from the forum table in the database and display. 

Something along this sequence of events is breaking periodically.  The rewrite's use code that doesn't ever change and same with the programming code of the site (PHP I'm guessing) so it can't be those because they're either broken or they're not.  The only other piece of the puzzle is the database server - it is the only other component that is under changing load/business and who's behavior can change.  

Are the server admins part of the group?  Is there anyone that can comment  on the construction of the site?  Any suggestions on how we can progress from here?

Regard

Eoin (who does these things for a living)

Hi Eoin,

Thanks for your input, but on the note above can you explain why someone like me who is on the site most of the day as moderator never sees any of these problems.

I mean 10% of people are talking about problems that only they or very few see.

As always we want to help, but your problem is the first if any of those in a long time.

We would have to say its client side not server.

B

Hey Brendan,

It's a fair point that I can't answer yet.  Also I must admit that it does not support my theory.

However,
in my opinion that is not strong enough evidence not to investigate the
server side.  I can provide source IP addresses and times of the
traffic when I had problems.

Apache keeps, or can easily be configured, to log accesses and
errors in the client connections, with IP and timestamps.  The most
frequent problem is this file not found error.  At minimum this request
will either be logged as a 200 (OK) or 404 (Not Found) code.

Using
my IP address and the time we should be able to correlate the
activities at the time.  If the logs prove it's the client side then
I'll investigate further on the client side.

Actually in work
the last two weeks have been devoted to tracking down a strange problem
that affected about 1 in 10K Internet users of our sites.  When the
affected user tried to do a HTTP POST with data larger than 1380 bytes
to our websites the whole request would time out and return an internal
server error.  Turned out that it was specific model d-link router with
broken path MTU detection that was overcome by tweaking the firewall of
the datacenter.

I don't mind where the problem is, I'd just like to get it fixed :)  What do you think about looking at the logs?

Regards,

Eoin