37744 - form submission fails on long posts (over 8Kb)

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: Networking, defect, P3)

Description

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Overview Description: 

Form submission fails with the message "The operation timed out when attempting
to contact [server name]" when submitting a form with a TEXTAREA that has more
than a certain number of characters in it, a certain number of which are tags.

Steps to Reproduce: 

Load test case and submit first form.

Actual Results: 

Error message appears after approx. one minute delay.

Expected Results: 

Form is submitted and page reappears.

Build Date & Platform Bug Found: 

Linux 2000-04-28-09

Additional Builds and Platforms Tested On: 

Linux M15 - doesn't work either
Linux Netscape 4.7 - works fine

Additional information:

I'm not sure exactly what is causing the problem, but it appears to be some
combination of the length of the string in the TEXTAREA and the number of tags
included in that string (or their length).  The type of tag is not important.  I
have succeeded in breaking Mozilla using <P> tags as well as XML tags specific
to the application in which I first discovered the problem.  The test case uses
the nonsensical tag <foofoofoofoofoofoofoo>.

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Attachment: test case

Comment 2

[rods (gone)]

reassigning

Comment 3

[Eric Pollmann]

Thanks for the awesome test case.  See bug 38057.

Comment 4

[Eric Pollmann]

Interestingly, tags cause the *URL encoded* string that is going to be 
submitted to the server be longer.  For example, in your test case, "7739 total 
characters in TEXTAREA, including 1692" gets expanded to 8195 characters, 
exactly three bytes longer than 8Kbytes.  I bet it is just the total number of 
characters sent to the server...

Also fails on NT.

Comment 5

[Eric Pollmann]

Attachment: smallest post that fails for me (8119 bytes, no tags)

Comment 6

[Eric Pollmann]

Above test case is the largest that succeeds, not the smallest that fails.  :S  
Adding one more char in the text area causes me to fail.  Since this is under 
8Kb (including foo= before the text), I'm guessing that there may a limit to the 
post size, including HTTP headers.  This may be a networking problem.

Comment 7

[Eric Pollmann]

This post gets down into netlib but never succeeds in writing the bytes to the 
server.  I traced it as far as this:

nsHTTPPipelinedRequest::OnStopRequest
...
                rv = mTransport->AsyncWrite(mInputStream, this, 
                        (nsISupports*)(nsIRequest*)req->mConnection);
...

The buffer in mInput Stream here has 8195 bytes in it (failing case) which 
includes the headers from Content-Type on down, then the form post data.  Since 
this appears to be netlib post failing, I'm reassigning it to the netlib folks.  
Please let me know if I can help!

Comment 8

[Warren Harris]

=> ruslan

Comment 9

[ruslan]

Fixed.

Comment 10

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Although the test case now works, bug 39809 prevents me from verifying this is
fixed in the application in which I originally found it, and that bug may be a
regression caused by the fix for this bug given the time period in which it
appeared.  I'll wait to verify this bug until I see what happens to the other
one.

Comment 11

[ckritzer (gone)]

->vladimire

Comment 12

[Vladimir Ermakov]

Verifying