[Zope] Hang while waiting for external process

[Paul Winkler]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 02:30:59PM -0500, Paul Winkler wrote:
(snip)
> Unfortunately I'm now starting to doubt my diagnosis...  had a couple
> more freezes that seemed unrelated to calls to convert.

OK, this is interesting.  Sorry for the false alarm - it turns out
Zope is not frozen at all, and it doesn't seem to have to do with
Photo or convert per se. Instead, I think I've found a bug in Netscape
6.

In Netscape 6.1 under Linux (redhat 7 upgraded to kernel 2.4.14), I
can reliably do the following:

1. go to any page Image in zope and view it.
  Alternatively, go to any page *containing* an image (although small
ones like the Zope logo seem to be OK for some reason???)

2. hit "reload" repeatedly.

On the 9th reload (why always the 9th???), the reload never completes.
(I haven't had the patience yet to leave it running overnight.)  If I
hit "stop", and then try to load any other page from this Zope server,
I get nothing. Netscape can still browse any other server or local
file, but gets no response from Zope. This is why I thought Zope was
frozen.

I can do this on any Image or Photo... doesn't matter which one.

BUT Zope still responds to requests from other clients! I should have
checked that before. I can access zope from lynx, links, or even other
instances of Netscape 6. I fired up a python session and used urllib
to access the same image my netscape was stuck on... put it in a "for"
loop and ran it 1000 times, no problem (damn it's fast!). Watched the
bigM log (with tail -f) ... it's responding all right.

All seems OK except for the one instance of Netscape that can't seem
to get in to zope. Watching the bigM log shows that zope is simply not
getting any requests from that Netscape any more. You try to connect
to any URL at this Zope server, and quite simply nothing happens.

But all I have to do is restart Netscape, not zope!

Very weird...
but not nearly as scary as zope freezing! :)

Later, I'll put netscape 4.7x on this machine and try that too...

-- 

paul winkler
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