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I have an ASP page entering a competition entries to a database.
As far as i was aware all was working well. However there have been a couple of complaints about users getting "page cannot be found" errors.
I assume the page does work, as most people have no problem with it.
However, the odd person seems to be having troubles.
One thought was that perhaps there dial up was not giving the ASP enough time to excecute before it timed out? Is this a possiblity or just rubbish?
Does anyone else suffer from this sort of thing? Does anyone have any ideas/opinions on what could be causing it?
Regards
Webboy
It could either be a 404 or a DNS problem, but generally customers are smart enough to spot the large "ASP SCRIPT TIMEOUT EXCEEDED" text which comes with a slow running script and they would tell you that "your site is broken" rather than the fact that they can't get to the page.
What do you web logs say was happening during these periods?
One thought was that perhaps there dial up was not giving the ASP enough time to excecute before it timed out? Is this a possiblity or just rubbish?
It's possible that if they have a slow connection they don't get the entire page quickly enough and the script times out - I have seen this before but only with overly large and unweildy pages. Normally you wouldn't encounter this problem with regular pages, but then again if their connection was slow enough...
A more likely answer is that your database may be taking a while to return an answer, when it does there is not enough time left to pass the data back to the client before the timeout expires. This is something I see a lot of...
If they are really getting "page cannot be displayed" while the site is running and accessible then potentially their ISP might be having routing or DNS problems.
Other classics include their ISP's proxy / corporate proxy caches an old copy of the page (which was broken for some reason) and every time they try to go to your site it displays that page for them without requesting a new version.
Really what you need to find out is what is the exact message they are seeing as then you can start to work out what is causing it.
- Tony
I think i have found the answer and solved the problem.
When people were inserting an apostrophe into some of the fields, the error was occuring. I had code for this on othe rfields, but had forgotten to add it to a couple of the fields.
This certainly seems to have solved most of the problem. A handful of people whoi couldn't register before have now registered succesfully.
It's strange though. It still does not explain why sometimes it worked and others it never. I guess people were not putting the ' in all the time.
Anyway, thanks for your help.
regrds
webboy
