CGI POST Failure to read Stdin

Sannyasin Sivakatirswami katir at hindu.org
Thu Apr 8 13:30:33 EDT 2004


Thanks, Pierre for the full report on this old bug... but the problem 
with your solution is two fold:

1) it assumes that the Rev developer has PHP skills (which I do not)  
even though we could simply copy your example... we would not know what 
we were doing... and many new users of xTalk CGI may only be fluent in 
xTalk and no other languages.

2) it assumes that one has admin rights to set up Revolution or 
Metacard on the server as a long running process. But, if one is 
hosting his site on a virtual host web server, about the most you can 
do is get approval to put the Revolution engine in your CGI-BIN... I 
don't know if it would be possible to then "boot" it as a long running 
process... I don't think so.

For now, our usage is a low enough hit rate (one POST every day or two 
at the most!)  to live with a pure xTalk solution. but, I'll be 
expanding the number of users up ward and we will watch carefully for 
failures. Of course this can't possibly reflect a "200 hits per second 
context."

We really should solve this. Some people will simply through the whole 
idea out of using Revolution to build an enterprise solution, just 
because of this one bug.

Best to all from Hawaii.

Sannyasin Sivakatirswami
Himalayan Academy Publications
at Kauai's Hindu Monastery
katir at hindu.org

www.HimalayanAcademy.com,
www.HinduismToday.com
www.Gurudeva.org
www.Hindu.org

On Apr 8, 2004, at 3:15 AM, Dave Cragg wrote:

> At 3:01 pm +0200 8/4/04, Pierre Sahores wrote:
>
>> I experimented this,a  long time ago... At least with the 2.3.2 and
>> above issues of the engine, MC/Rev is failing 1 time peer 20 periods 
>> in
>> handling "POST" requests in CGI mode.
>>
>> It's a sad reproductible bug we spoken about with Scott Raney, a long
>> time ago, on and off-list, without getting any way to solve
>> definitivelly the problem.
>
> Have you tested this recently, Pierre? I've been using the 2.5 engine 
> extensively on Windows (with IIS) and on OS X (with Apache) for CGI 
> and haven't encountered any problems with POST. (As long as you're 
> careful about reading in the data from stdin.) In fact, I've found it 
> remarkably stable.
>
> The only hitch I've found is with IIS on Windows, where it's a good 
> idea to put a short wait (20 milliseconds) before the "end startup" 
> line in the script (this is not just for POST but GET as well).
>
> I'd be interested to hear of other people's experience.
>
> Cheers
> Dave



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