Forum OpenACS Q&A: howto approach diagnosing form submission "hanging" indefinitely

1: howto approach diagnosing form submission "hanging" indefinitely

Posted by Torben Brosten on 01/29/04 11:09 AM

For example, on ecommerce/www/admin/orders/items-return-3 a "confirmation" form presents refund info, where user clicks button "Complete the refund" to initiate a refund.

On a few occasions, clicking "Complete the refund" button results with browser waiting indefinitely (in Mozilla, the status window shows "Waiting for servername..." and the icon appears as a watch). Indefinitely means greater than 1 hour.

The error log does not indicate anything out of the ordinary. And tests of refund status from a separate browser seems to indicate that the refund process was completed.

What kind of things might cause the submission to hang like that?

2: Re: howto approach diagnosing form submission "hanging" indefinitely (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 01/30/04 01:03 AM

Since you say the refund process was completed, I assume you can see the request in the access log?

You might want to ask on the AOLserver list, because I suspect this has nothing to do with OpenACS per se but rather AOLserver->browser communication.

I know that the socket dropping during a long file transmission to a user will cause AOLserver to log a mysterious error.

I don't know offhand if a socket drop logs an error for normal ns_return type operations though. It's not unknown for dial-up connections in particular to get interrupted by, say, someone picking up a phone hooked up to the same line in a home.

But this is the type of problem I suspect. Is this on a production system or development system? Is there some sort of pattern to the IPs you see in the access log that fail?

3: Re: howto approach diagnosing form submission "hanging" indefinitely (response to 1)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 01/30/04 08:38 AM

Since you say the refund process was completed, I assume you can see the request in the access log?

for items-return-3 yes, for items-return-4 no.. (checked service0-error.log and service0.log). Aha. Time to become a human tcl interpreter.

Going through the inserts step by step, it looks like "insert_refund_transaction" did not insert a refund for subsequent processing by the gateway. So must have failed silently at it or just before.

Interesting (to me anyway) there is no ec_tax table (Oregon doesn't have sales tax) yet no errors from references to it. Is that normal behavior?

ps. thanks for the suggestions, am keeping them for future reference.

4: Re: howto approach diagnosing form submission "hanging" indefinitely (response to 1)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 01/30/04 12:47 PM

accidently ommitted file reference:

ecommerce/www/admin/orders/items-return-4.tcl

Server is running openacs4.6.3, aolserver3.4.2oacs1, postgresql 7.2.4, freebsd 4.9stable

This server is not busy (yet), but in each case, multiple ecommerce/admin windows were open in various states of order processing. Could references to indexes on foreign key columns[1] give this symptom?

In any case, what would be a/the preferred way to resolving the index issue? I want to avoid problems before they occur. Recreating the tables in a fresh install (using edited create.xql files or whatever) is fine by me.

1. https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=76563