248253 - hanging connections leads to inability to load any connections

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[cezo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9

I'm not quite technical enough to describe this so bear with me.

On myspace.com (and probably others), sometimes when the server is overloaded
the image server will hang, which causes a strange reaction in Firefox.

This is generally fixed in other browsers (like IE) by simply reloading the
page. The images load, everything is fine. However, I've noticed in Firefox that
when the connections begin hanging, it seems like it busies some socket(?) and
is afterwards unable to make any new connection to that image. It gets to a
point where images are not loading at all. Reloading does nothing, closing and
reopening tabs does nothing.

Yet it's not a site issue, because launching another browser side by side shows
that all images still load fine. Its 100% in firefox and nowhere else.

I'm wondering, is there something about concurrent connections that might be
left open and blocked on connection errors?



Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
Sorry, its a bit difficult to reproduce.

Comment 1

[Stefan Geisseler]

I know what you mean...
I have similar problems with entire pages.
Best chance for it is on my own webserver, where I get stats over a socket via
php what takes some time to send the page to the browser. But unfortunately the
page is on a private space ( http://stats.flirtcom.net ).
1. Open such a page with a big delay (perhaps also server-related)
2. Klick on a link on that Page to open another page before the first page has
loaded

Neither frist nor second page loads while there is no problem when you wait long
enough. I've encountered that problem on several other slow pages, but there has
to be some more conditions I have to figure out perhaps with sniffering the
traffic between me and the server...
Perhaps some permanent socket connections fail to proceed when a transaction
didn't finished. IE has no such Problem (perhaps resets such connections).
Perhaps also some servers do better prevent such conflicts on their side...
I know that bug now for months, but I can't give you a 100% reproduction and
never mentioned it (perhaps I should put a public testcase with an almost 100%
hit rate on my server...)

Comment 2

[Robin Monks]

Seems to be a network issue, although I may be wrong...

Comment 3

[Stefan Geisseler]

Reproducible steps:

1. go to www.flirtcom.net and you will see the portal page
2. click on "Members" then "Chat" as fast as you can, before the "Members" page
tries to render

If you end up with the "Chat"-Page, try again
If you end up with an endless loading-mouse cursor, you encountered the bug and
can make further observations:
- No other link will work on that page from now on
- Open another tab/window and type www.flirtcom.net: also nothing seems to work here
- Close the first testwindow (but leave some other firefox windows open) and
also try to open a page on that server: still no reaction
- Close all firefox windows (restart firefox): now the pages work again
- Try the same thing with IE: no such effect appears

Comment 4

[Stefan Geisseler]

Correction: IE also seems to have that problem now, and since I've sniffered the
traffic, it's obvious that it is a "Connection: Keep-Alive" Bug either on some
Apache-Server-sites or browsers with that feature. Traffic seems to stop in the
middle of the first page you load, and the browser seems to send no further "GET
... HTTP/1.1 to the server (I don't know if that would help)

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

WFM per reporter "i dont seem to have this problem anymore"