IE6 ajax requests and mod_proxy problem

Rails
1

Hi all,

Since switching to SSL, we’ve been getting a ton of these messages in
the apache error log:

[Wed Jan 17 19:19:05 2007] [error] (70007)The timeout specified has
expired: proxy: prefetch request body failed to 127.0.0.1:8002
(127.0.0.1) from ()

These happen exclusively with IE6 ajax requests. The user then sees
our spinner icon infinitely, eventually apache thrown a scary looking
internal error page back. Needless to say a fairly large % of our
users use IE6 so this is pretty serious for us.

We use apache2.2.3 and mod_proxy + mod_proxy_balancer -> mongrel
cluster. Anyone seen this before or know what’s going on?

thanks,
-Andrew

2

Wanted to follow up on this now that we have it fixed.

Apparently there is a bug in internet explorer 6 that will send a
content-length of 0 sometimes on a post. (
http://www.modwest.com/help/kb2-260.html – states it’s intermittent).
That would explain the pretty random behaviour we’re seeing.

The fix that worked as follow, though with a performance hit (
http://www.verysimple.com/blog/?cat=14 ‘(although with a performance
hit)’)

<FilesMatch "\.(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">
     SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
</FilesMatch>

BrowserMatch ".*MSIE.*" \
     nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
     downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

in the vhosts file. ( http://blog.innerewut.de/articles/search?q=SSL)

Darn Microsoft. Well, it gave us a chance to advertise FF while things
were broken for IE. :slight_smile:

-Andrew