Browser hangs when attaching file

I recently moved our production Wiki to Foswiki 1.0.9, on AIX.

In one of our webs when a user tries to attach a spreadsheet (.xls) the browser just remains as "Loading..." the file never gets attached. It appears to happen randomly. What is strange is the attachment function in the WYSIWYG editor works fine.

I looked through the foswiki and apache log files and there is nothing out of the ordinary. How else can I troubleshoot this issue?

Thanks

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Hi Terry,

I'm sorry I don't have a more direct answer to your question, but here is some advice:

1. Check the size of the files - are they too big? I think the default is 10,000KB - also your web server environment may have a maximum upload size set too.
2. Are you familiar with wireshark or firebug's "net panel"? It might be interesting to see if there are any clues in the network traffic - does the upload request never complete? Or is there a subsequent request that fails?
3. Are you using any persistent perl setup? FastCGI/mod_perl? If so, does the problem persist when running the site with plain old slow CGI?

Finally, if you are feeling adventurous, you may wish to sprinkle print STDERR "I am a test 1"; lines throughout lib/Foswiki/UI/Upload.pm to try to figure out where it's stopping (the messages will appear in your apache error log)

If you are not familiar with this type of debugging it would be better to help you through it on the IRC channel rather than explain it all here

Hopefully some others here have more helpful suggestions

-- PaulHarvey - 21 Jul 2010

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Hi Paul,

Thanks for your comments,

1. The file size is very small only 20KB
2. I tried the firebug net panel, which is very cool, and when I click on the "Upload file" button, net panel doesn't report anything, the browser just says it's waiting so it appears this is on the initial request.
3. I am using regular CGI

I'll try out adding in print STDERR's in the Upload.pm file and see what I can find.

Update: As a stretch I disabled the line: Options +ExecCGI -FollowSymLinks, and restarted Apache and everything appears okay. I am not sure if it has something to do with just restarting apache or diabling FollowSymLinks

Update: I have not had any further issues since restarting Apache, I am going to close this question. Thanks

-- TerryBochaton - 21 Jul 2010

You could try to enable FollowsymLinks again. If the problem reappears then this setting is the source of the problem, otherwise the Apache restart was enough.

-- TorbenGB - 23 Jul 2010