Bug #18271: Page load hangs in apparently normal circumstances

From: Brendan@callaghans.com.au Operating system: Win2000 Server PHP version: 4.2.0 PHP Bug Type: Reproducible crash Bug description: Page load hangs in apparently normal circumstances Platform information: Windows 2000 Server IIS 5 MSSQL 2000 Hi, For some time now, my PHP site has been experiencing an intermittent problem - very elusive. Every now and then, a user would try to do something and the next page simply would not load. All my users are accessing the site with IE6, and when the hang occurs, the status bar displays the text "Opening page ****...", and the blue status indicator crawls slowly to the right. But nothing happens. The screen doesn't even clear from the previous page. No errors, no warnings. I even tried turning on E_NOTICE, but none of those either. This continues for a couple of minutes, until IIS gives up and reports a CGI Timeout. Typically, if the user closed all his IE windows, and then went back in, things would work normally again. So I assumed it had something to do with accumulating too much session data (hence, destroying the session by closing all the IE processes cleared things up). And since it was not reproducible, I couldn't do very much about it. However, just recently we discovered a series of actions which reproduces the problem, regardless of how "fresh" the session is. The page in question is quite simple compared to some of the other pages in the site, which is why I find it curious that it should trigger the bug consistently. When you first load the page, it presents a HTML form, asking the user for some data. When the form is submitted (it submits back to the same php file), the page generates a fairly basic report. The bizarre part is that with certain data inputs, the report runs fine (and total execution time is about a third of a second), and with certain other data inputs, the report will not load at all. This page doesn't put any data in the session, the code doesn't use any particularly exciting functions, and I can't discern any relevant difference between the data input which works, and the data input which triggers the hang. I can't debug it using PHP code, because it doesn't even reach the stage of outputting HTML. I am very confused and looking for a hint as to how I can proceed. I searched the bug database, but didn't find any matches to my problem. The bug is causing some serious angst in my user base. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. BJ -- Edit bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=18271&edit=1 -- Fixed in CVS: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=18271&r=fixedcvs Fixed in release: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=18271&r=alreadyfixed Need backtrace: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=18271&r=needtrace Try newer version: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=18271&r=oldversion Not developer issue: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=18271&r=support Expected behavior: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=18271&r=notwrong Not enough info: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=18271&r=notenoughinfo Submitted twice: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=18271&r=submittedtwice register_globals: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=18271&r=globals