Wrong order of the request in access log

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Wrong order of the request in access log

Patric

3:43 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I have seen some weird things in my access log (Apache 1.3) lately.

1.1.1.1 - - [21/Jan/2003:21:33:39 -0500] "GET /style.css HTTP/1.1" 200 681 "http://www.mydomain.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)" "-"
1.1.1.1 - - [21/Jan/2003:21:33:39 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 36345 "http://www.refdomain.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)" "-"

The request for the CSS file comes before the request where the CSS file is included from. It's not one or two request, there's lots of them.
The referring site gains on sending more hits to me. To me this doesn't look like a legitimate request made by a regular browser.

Any comments or insights?

hakre

3:51 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi patric,

welcome to webmasterworld. in your log 2 different domains are logged. maybe that's why?

Patric

3:54 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

Thanks :)

No, I have just 1 domain per log file.

hakre

4:11 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

hmm. then it's not the point. ahh. i think it's because the transfer of the css file was finished erlier then of the html page and that is why! apache logs it after the file was transferred sothat it can indicate a partial content or whatever if the connection messes up or the client process dies (error 500 for example).

Patric

4:43 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

I haven't thought about that before. I'll take a look at how Apache does the logging.
Thanks for the input.

bcc1234

5:26 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

I second that. Apache only logs after the request has been processed.
So if some browser starts loading css as soon as it sees the reference in the header of an html page - that's what you would see in the log files.

Patric

5:36 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

I see. Then it would make sense.

Thanks guys.

hakre

5:59 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

ah, from the dusty beginning, this went to a real analyzing thread now. cool. ;)

Patric

6:05 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

I did some testing before this with different browsers, but I never managed to reproduce this behavior.
But I actually managed to do it now.
Latest Opera, fast pipe to the server and voila. The CSS file ended up before the index.html request :)

I used the same browser but through a proxy that was far away from the server, then the index.html ended up before the CSS file request.

Thanks again,
Patric