Question

On several of my Twiki installations, I have a curious problem: everything works fine, with saving and attaching and versioning -- but when I edit and save a huge topic, like TWikiPreferences, then the save simply spins and never ends. How can I fix this?

This is on http://www.erebaltor.dk (Danish, open for all) and a few others as well. It's based on RichardDonkin's installation notes, TWiki:Codev/DreamhostSetupNotes, with a few revisions for i18n support etc.: http://g-b.dk/bin/view/Main/InstallTwikiOnDreamhost

After a long wait, I get this error message (probably from the proxy server?). This was after making a simple edit in my TWikiPreferences.

ERROR

The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: [no URL]

The following error was encountered:

• Read Timeout

The system returned:

    [No Error]

A Timeout occurred while waiting to read data from the network. The network or server may be down or congested. Please retry your request.

Environment

-- TorbenGB - 27 Jan 2005

Answer

Hello? I would love to hear some comments on this...

-- TorbenGB - 14 Feb 2005

there are a growing number of reports of problems like this, but no concrete answers (that I'm aware of). Most of them seem to have involved Apache2 but maybe that's just coincidence.

SaveTakesForeverIntermittently, TimeOutSavingTWikiPreferences (see very end for a workaround)

-- MattWilkie - 16 Feb 2005

But this consistently happens for any long topic. The Prefs topic is just an example. There is no way for me to edit long topics anymore, except by direct FTP of the .txt file bad practise!

-- TorbenGB - 16 Feb 2005

When it hangs, can you do a ps auxw on the server and see a perl process running /path/to/twiki/installation/bin/oops ?

-- AndyBakun - 19 Feb 2005

Odd! I always get these timeouts from work, but from work I don't have telnet access, so I can't run the ps auxw command. Now I edited my TWiki.TWikiPreferences topic from home and did a ps auxw at the same time, and the save just worked, and even did so very quickly. So I can't give any meaningful response on this error; it only happens from work where I don't have telnet access. OTOH, if it works from home, then it would indicate an issue with the corporate firewall. But why does that issue only show on saving long topics, never on short topics, and never on other HTTP posts or requests? I'm stumped.

[salt]$ ps auxw
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
gbdk     25173  0.1  0.0   2212  1228 pts/1    Ss   13:31   0:00 -bash
gbdk     25923 15.0  0.1   4752  3664 ?        D    13:31   0:00 /usr/bin/perl -wT save
gbdk     25570  0.0  0.0   2200   800 pts/1    R+   13:32   0:00 ps auxw

-- TorbenGB - 20 Apr 2005