Intermittent problem with POST submissions

[Sagaris]

Not sure if this is the correct place for this post so mods please move if you feel it would be better stored/answered in another section.

I have a form that submits to a PHP script using POST (the form and script are in the same file), and recently we have been having reports of 1 or 2 users pressing the submit button on the form and then being presented with a blank screen.

I have been trying to recreate the users issue by analysing the apache server log file and looking at a PHP error log.

No errors have been recorded in the php log file and I can't recreate the issue myself having tried various different tests which leads me to believe the form is working ok from a script perspective, and the problem lies elsewhere.

Looking through the apache log I can see that the user reporting the problem requested the form itself using GET, however there is no POST to the form script recorded in the log.

My thinking on this is that it may be a server/network (at my webhost) issue due to it's intermittent nature and the fact we cannot recreate the issue. The host insists that they have no logs of problems of this type.

What can I do to further debug this problem, has anybody ever had this type of problem and how did they resolve it?

[wilderness]

My host ("el cheapo"), recently went through some Apache updates as well as their PHP Form Generator updates. As a result of the updates, the path to the form was modified. This modification resulted in the form submissions not working, while absent of any notification in visitor logs or by "el cheapo" administration.

I'm quite lucky that I became aware of non-functional Form as soon as I did.

[jdMorgan]

If you don't see a POST, then you don't see a POST -- The request never arrived at your server, and that's not due to any scripting problem. This sounds like a connection problem of some kind, but that's all that can be inferred from the "blank screen" reports.

Jim

[Sagaris]

Thanks for the replies guys - I think it must be a connection problem as jdMorgan says.

I will keep a close eye on forms in my logs for the next few days to check this isn't continuing to happen.