Intermittent Server Error

The page cannot be displayed

[lorax]

I'm attempting to place an item into an osComm cart using a link. The link is in the form of:

h**p://www.targetdomain.com/catalog/index.php?action=buy_now&products_id=43

Sometimes it works - sometimes it doesn't. About half the time this will generate a "connection closed by remote server" in Opera 7.X, a "The page cannot be displayed" in IE 6.X, and nothing (or maybe it's a blank page) in Moz Firebird 0.7. It seems that once it's successful it will work fine for at least several more tries but it will take several attempts to get a success.

The issue acts like it's session related in that once I get a successful load - it will work for a few times more. But I'm grabbing at straws here.

Might someone have an idea of what's going on?

[gergoe]

It can be caused by several things, for example;

• http-ssl related (if you use it all);
  
• Slow page processing time (maybe only in the beginning as you mentioned), and timeout occurred in the browser, or the php engine stopped the processing after the timeout; enable the server-status module (and the content handler) in the apache config - if you have access to it, and check out the concurrent requests;
  
• Some weird error on the php page, enable the php error logging - if you have access to do to, and check it out;
  
• Might be related to apache or to the OS, but if you check out the apache log files, you should be able to see it, and in this case all of the pages should have the same problem.
  

Check out the apache log files in the first place, from the http response codes you can already start troubleshooting the problem, or there might be some items in the errorlog which give you a good start. Check the faulty pages with a Server Header Check tool [webmasterworld.com], can the tool request the page successfully, and what the server sends in the responses.

[lorax]

Thanks gergoe,
Twas gone for a few days on vaca. I think the issue had to do with how I was storing sessions. The cart was setup to use MySQL to store SIDs. When I switched back to cookie based SIDs then the error went away. So, I assume that the issue had to do with MySQL performance. Not sure what though.