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Not Answered Thread: Pages appear to stop responding

Last post 11-20-2009 8:00 AM by mrozik. 86 replies.

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  • 05-07-2009, 7:00 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    I have been testing this page and I do not notice any problems with it. I am just refresh the page and it worked every time.

    Also the regular site www.winebid.com seems to function fine as well. I was getting reproducible errors before.

    However I am on another machine XP SP2 with FF 3.0.10 (and otehr corp sofwatre like fairewall, etc) rather than XP SP3 with FF 3.0.9 (the last time I checked) of my home machine to check your site.

    And on a different ISP/corp network also.

    So why is it now working fine? Have you changed your code? Or the server? I imagine not. The only that I can see that has changed is the client setup and now it appears to be all ok using FF 3.0.10?

    Is it if the client machine setup is with XP SP3 AND with new FF AND with certain code AND with WINDOWS 2008/IIS7.0 fails AND maybe certain ISPs/networks it fails.

    I think there are more factors at play than just the what has been identified. Just limiting it to FF 3.0.6+ and WIndows2008/ IIS 7.0 is misleading.

    What user agents are effected? Are there any useragnets that are never effected.

    I am using this user agent string atm

    User-Agent    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

    And have been trying to reproduce the error that was every time reproducible on my how machine.


    So why isn't this machine failing?  I would expect it too.

    I cannot compare the client machines/networks side-by-side atm as working away from home.

  • 05-07-2009, 7:24 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    Rovastar, you have to click on the NEXT link in order to perform a POST. That is the event that causes the issue to occur. Refreshing doesn't test the problem. Also, don't forget to wait about 60 seconds between the initial page load and clicking the link, as that is also a required triggering event.

  • 05-07-2009, 7:33 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    On the live site I was going next page.

    (For the test page when you said you removed all the code behind I presumed you had removed the functionality of the buttons, etc so I refreshed.)

    To follow this look at the url (i didn't know what to search for so I just typed 'wine' :) )
    http://www.winebid.com/buy_wine/search_results.aspx?SearchString=wine&PBCT=1
    About 10:52:00 AM uk time.

    and subsequent pages from there.

    and get my IP and details from there.

    Then you can track me and see what i did and as you can see the responses were fine.

    Maybe you can do some log file analysis and get a better pattern of the what the useragnet strings are too. 


     

  • 05-07-2009, 7:40 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    Looking at the log files I can see you are waiting several minutes between postbacks. That is also a way to avoid the issue. You cannot wait a couple minutes between posts as that seems to clear the issue as well (and is part of the reason why I feel it is related to FireFox's handling of HTTP connections).

  • 05-07-2009, 7:42 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    Would you like to see the IP traffic of the issue I captured via WireShark? It is definitely different with FireFox compared to MSIE or Safari.

  • 05-07-2009, 8:57 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    ianderson:

    Looking at the log files I can see you are waiting several minutes between postbacks. That is also a way to avoid the issue. You cannot wait a couple minutes between posts as that seems to clear the issue as well (and is part of the reason why I feel it is related to FireFox's handling of HTTP connections).

     

    Ummh I thought the longer you left it the more of an issue it was. So there is a peak problem time of say 1 minute and up to what 5 minutes? When a (one of the many) timeout occurs it is all ok again?

    I haven't used wireshark much do you have a netmon output?

  • 05-07-2009, 3:12 PM In reply to

    • pbreitz
    • Not Ranked
    • Joined on 04-30-2009, 8:08 PM
    • Posts 8

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

     Alrighty, I've got a ticket open with MSDN support and they're looking into the issue.  I was able to reproduce the issue, and provided MS with the following:

    1. Wireshark dump from the client
    2. Wireshark dump from the server
    3. iis log
    4. failed request log

    You can see a whole bunch of black (TCP Retransmissions) on both sides until the request finally comes back.  IIS logs show nothing until all the TCP business gets sorted out, at which point the response is normal. As I suspected, nothing of note in the failed request logs.

    I'll keep the group posted on how this gets resolved.

    -paul

  • 05-07-2009, 3:51 PM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    Fantastic! Great work Paul!

    I actually opened up a case in the FireFox bugtracker to attack the problem from that angle as well:

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491541

    Hopefully one of these parties will figure out what the issue is...

     

  • 05-07-2009, 4:01 PM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    Excellent.  I didn't know how to gather some of those logs or how to read them.  I'm glad that someone that knows how to handle that is handling that.  I hope that you'll post results of anything you find to this forum.

    Thanks!
    Jesse

  • 05-08-2009, 7:43 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    The Mozilla team seems to think that IIS7 is not properly closing connections. FireFox apparently holds connections for 5 minutes and attempts to reuse them during this time period. This may be longer than other browsers and may explain why FireFox is the only one that displays this issue. See the updates in the bug report for more details:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491541

    It might be worth asking the MSDN support people to look at how IIS7 (or Windows Server 2008) is closing TCP connections...

  • 05-08-2009, 8:31 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    Ok so it seems that in some situations that a connection has been left open.

    The firefox people seem to think that they send out the packet information.

    However we still don't know if the server is receiving the packet. If the packet is correct (not corrupted) Then if it has been processed in the TCP/IP stack or then if it is getting to IIS.

    What if it is a dodgy network card/server hardware/etc setup? *shrug*  Did you set the server up or a hosting company?

    If it connections issues you could try increasing your http keepalives timeout from 120 to something more. Hopefully that will give you more functionality.

    What timeout settings are you using for your server? http, asp.net, sessions, etc, etc

    That still doesn't explain why I am not getting any issues at all at the moment. And that too me is even more confusing as it goes against all the investigation that you have made so far as it shouldn't work.

    I just waited 3 minutes on your test page and clicked 'next' and it is all ok.

  • 05-08-2009, 8:45 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    First of all, this will most likely not be a "dodgy network card"  This problem has been duplicated on several different servers. The commonalities are ALWAYS IIS7 and FireFox.  This has been duplicated by MANY different people.  You must wait a specific amount of time before this occurs.  My understanding is if you bring the page up, and wait a little more than 130 seconds (a little over 2 minutes), then try to proceed that the problem will most likely occur.  As was already pointed out too, this does not ALWAYS happen, but it does frequently happen. But, if you change either your browser, or to a different version of IIS (IIS6, for instance), this problem goes away.

    Jesse

  • 05-08-2009, 8:47 AM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    Please explain to me how it could be a dodgy network card/server that only affects FireFox? You have suggested this numerous times, and each time I have reiterated that the problem is specific to a single browser version. One would expect a dodgy network card (or any hardware issue for that matter) to have problems across the board.

    I believe the reason it is intermittent (i.e. can't be reproduced 100% of the time) has to do with server load. Perhaps IIS/Windows leaves the connection open for a certain period of time until the connection resource is disposed of on the server? Perhaps it does this more often as the server gets more load? That would explain why you have a tuff time reproducing it as you are hitting our site at a very slow time of day (European daytime).

  • 05-11-2009, 12:11 PM In reply to

    • pbreitz
    • Not Ranked
    • Joined on 04-30-2009, 8:08 PM
    • Posts 8

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    Here is Microsoft's response to the ticket I opened. 

    Firefox is waiting for more than the standard 2 minutes before trying to re-use the connection.

    Firefox never sends "FIN" command(FIN- Finish is used during a graceful session close to show that the sender has no more data to send) to the server, so it cannot re-open the connection.

    IIS times the request out as expected, due to the default 2 minute ConnectionTimeout setting of HTTP.sys.

    The IIS server, however should not be waiting for 9 seconds to send a reset. So we doubt that there could be some issues with the NIC or NIC drivers which initiates this waiting.

    So, the part of the problem here is Firefox trying to reuse an old connection.

    The other problem seems to be with TCP on the server not issuing a timely RST(RST- Reset is an instantaneous abort in both directions (abnormal session disconnection)).

    Recommendations:

    Let’s  disable TCP chimney and/or update NIC drivers on server.

    Lets run the following command to disable the TCPChimney,

    Netsh int ip set chimney DISABLED


    Unfortunately that command didn't work for me... I kept getting "command not found". So they had me add the following registry entries:

    Lets add the following registry entries and set those values to zero.

    EnableTCPChimney
    Type: REG_DWORD
    Values: 1 (enabled) 0 (disabled))

    EnableRSS
    Type: REG_DWORD
    Values: 1 (enabled) 0 (disabled))

    EnableTCPA
    Type: REG_DWORD
    Values: 1 (enabled) 0 (disabled))

    I need to reboot and try to reproduce again, but I figured I'd share what I've got so far in case anyone else has better luck.

    -paul

  • 05-11-2009, 12:25 PM In reply to

    Re: Pages appear to stop responding

    The 5-minute timeout is probably why the issue is specific to FireFox browsers. MSIE defaults to a 60-sec timeout, which is a shorter window than IIS, so that explains why MSIE appears to be unaffected. I have been testing to try to see if IIS is properly sending a RST to close/cancel the connection after the server timeout is reached, but I don't see IIS responding at all. Seems like either IIS has a bug and it isn't sending the proper RST response, or there is something in the stack that is preventing this command from reaching the browser. Seems like disabling TCPChimney is an attempt by MS to see if the problem lies in the TCP data processing... When it is enabled it appears to pass this off to the network card for handling. Hope disabling it fixes the problem!

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