TCP/IP or IE problem driving me nutz. Can you help?

[Alex Franke]

So now I turn to my friends at my favorite woodworking forum for a rather strange and technical problem... Not even Google seems to know what's going on here.

I'm trying to set up one of my sites on a Linux host using Drupal instead of ASP.NET. And everything seemed to be going fine until I tried to open the site in IE.

In IE (but not firefox) I started getting blank pages randomly. Hit refresh and the content is back. Hit refresh a few more times, and it's there again. Hit refresh again, and it's blank. Same page -- just hitting refresh. I view the source and it cuts off at the same place every time it breaks -- right in the middle of a tag, actually. Other pages act similarly, but cut off in different places -- again randomly, but enough to impact users (maybe 1/20 times, sometimes a few times in a row.)

The page is not caching. It happens from three different computers on 3 different IP addresses on 3 different ISPs. It has happened on the first time I visited any page on the site from a computer/IP/ISP that has never visited the site.

So out comes Wireshark. I'm no pro at wireshark, but I fumbled my way through to reproduce the problem -- one failure and one success in the same capture. From what I can tell, the ENTIRE page is returned each time -- just as it should be. So how can IE be arbitrarily and randomly cutting it off?

Could there be something in the TCP conversation that gives IE the idea that it's done when it's not? (e.g. server tells IE, "you're going to get 10 packets" but actually sends 20.)

Any ideas out there? Please let me know if you have any ideas or you think you can help... This is really driving me up a wall and I'd much rather me in the shop than reading through packets! (yuck! )

Thanks!

[crokett]

Uhm... maybe it is simpler than that? Maybe it is just IE? What version of IE? Do different version do this? Is it the same tag it cuts off at each time? What if you take that tag out?

Have you tried using ethereal? What little ethernet tracing I've done I prefer ethereal to wireshark.

It has been a while but I don't think TCP says I am sending X packets and then sends those packets. I think it starts sending packets and then sends a control frame to indciate the end of the conversation.

[Alex Franke]

It does only seem to happen in IE. I only have IE7, so that's all I've checked it with. I was hoping that IE was just handling the conversation differently for whatever reason -- I mean, if the whole page comes back over TCP, then shouldn't it make it into the browser?

It breaks at different different places for different pages -- sometimes in the middle of content, sometimes in the middle of a tag, sometimes in the middle of a comment... but always at the exact same place for the particular page that fails.

I thought Etherial and Wireshark were one in the same now... I'll have to look into that I guess.

Thanks for the tips, crockett. On a whim, I checked to make sure the page validates, and it does just fine to XHTML strict.

I did just realize, though, that each time the page dies, I only get 8266 bytes back... hmmm... [divides by 2 == 4133... darn, that's not a very suspicious number...]

Look like I'm off to google 8266... This is driving me to drink! LOL

[mkel2000]

Wireshark is Ethereal, just an updated version. The original author left the parent company of Ethereal and couldn't take the name so it was re-named to Wireshark. All future development will be on Wireshark.

Have you checked the web server logs to see if there might be any indication that something is amiss? Although I wouldn't suspect you'll find anything, it's worth a look.

It sound suspiciously like you have a corrupted version of IE. You could try running System File Checker to see if you have any system files needing repair (at a command prompt type: sfc /scannow). If that doesn't fix the problem, you can also check the Microsoft Knowledge Base for instructions on re-installing IE. I've had to do that before, but I don't remember the process; there should be a knowledge base article to tell you how.

The last thing you can try, for troubleshooting purposes, is to install the Firefox plugin that allows you to run web pages as though they were being run in IE. Try running your page in Firefox under an IE tab and see if it works. That might provide some clue as to what's happening.

Good luck,

Mark

[cgallery]

Does it always cut it off at the same # of bytes?

And is all of this local (server and clients)? Or, are you going over the Internet to get from the client to the server?

[wbsettle]

Just wanted to chip in with a vote for IE7 being the culprit. I've noticed the behavior you describe with a number of established web sites, mostly forums, using Vista Home Premium and IE7 on a preloaded Toshiba laptop. The frequency, which wasn't to the level of annoying before, seems to have declined over time. Is your IE7 up to date on patches?

-Brent

[Lee4847]

Ie7

We have stopped and in some cases rolled back to IE6 at work because of problems like this with IE7. Try removing IE7 on one of the PC's that is giving you this error. When you remove 7 it reverts to 6. See if it continues to give blank pages. I had to do this to a PC yesterday that one of the users decided to download IE7.

[smc331]

Ditto on IE7 being the most likely culprit - I've even had non-browser related issues on my users' computers miraculously disappear when an IE7 to IE6 rollback is performed!

[cgallery]

I haven't personally experienced the problem w/ IE7. And if using IE6 is the fix, I'd say that is a problem. You'll severely limit your user base if you tell people they can't use 7.

[radhak]

maybe we all could check if we see the problem?

unless there's some issue with you giving out the website/link.

[Alex Franke]

Well, I saw the same problem with IE6 on the kitchen computer, except it was actually more frequent and the HTML cut off earlier. I'm up to date on the patches. And the problem appears on at least 4 computers, now. I guess it had to have something to do with IE and the Drupal site, but I can't figure out what...

The site is obviously not ready to be released, and I don't want it to get picked up by spiders, so I'll disguise the name a bit. It's at

h t t p://www [dot] rackcreations [dot] com -- I usually start seeing the blank pages either right away or after about 20 clicks or so. Under the "content" section, click on Tutorials or Audio or Plans.

I'm worried about the IE problem because most of my visitors still use IE, and many are on IE7...

My latest theory is that perhaps one of the includes is doing something to get in the way of IE's HTML parser and renderer. I need to sift through the code I guess.

Guys, I really appreciate all your help on this!!!

[cgallery]

Home page and 2nd page load for me at least several times each (on IE7).

[sparkeyjames]

Firefox under Linux (KDE desktop) no problems. Sounds like an IE 6 problem to me. IE 6 has some serious problems with CSS (cascading style sheets) if drupal has or uses lots of CSS this may be the problem. Efforts were made in IE 7 to correct those problems but they still came up short. Look for IE CSS bugs in google.

[Alex Franke]

sparkey, the style I was using did have a lot of css includes -- like over 30 of them. So I switched back to the normal, out-of-the-box Drupal style.

Guess what? No more blank pages! ...at least not in the past 10 minutes or so. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

This forum rocks!