hi all. i'm not entirely sure that this problem is even caused by php, but it may be, and this is by far the most helpful webdev resource i've found. hopefully someone can help. i've spent hours poking around on this and other sites looking for a solution with no success. i know windows and IE stinks, but it's what the overwhelming majority of visitors to our site use.

i've got a simple .php3 script working with a mysql database to generate web pages. i'm using template.inc from PHPLIB and a single .ihtml file as my template. my script uses the mysql database to plug all the variable meta-tag and content holes in my .ihtml file

i can gladly provide code examples from my script or .ihtml template if it would be helpful for troubleshooting. i think this problem may be more general than code chunks, though.

first here's a URL of my mostly-empty php site if you'd like to check it out.

www.mbinet.org/web/main/index.html

the php script is called 'web.php3'. /main/index.html is just two cloaked variables ('main' and 'index') for use in page generation.

the site works fine in Netscape on winblows and Mac. i've still got a couple weeks of development left before populating the database and taking it live, but in Netscape it behaves as expected.

when i try to load the page in IE, the script seems to run fine until right after the parsed template is on its way to the browser. my background color changes to a light green, as specified in the <BODY> tag, and the browser freezes.
...cursor/hourglass hovering frozen in the emptiness...

now for the part that has me utterly confused:

if i delete my IE cache and clear the history, and delete the DNS and file caches on our office proxy server, i can sometimes get the page to load once. on the rare occassion that it does load, my problem comes back as soon as i hit shift+reload.

at first i though this may all have something to do with the fact that i'm preloading animated .gifs with some javascript, but i pulled all the javascript out and the problem persists. now i think that it either has something to do with nested tables or the php template parsing. I'm having trouble pinning down what's happening, though, because IE either locks up before it displays anything more than light green or shows the page as it's supposed to be.

is this a simple problem to solve? has anyone heard of something like this before?

want to help? i'll give you a chocolate cake or some fancy jellybeans!

🙂 thanks.

-dolphinsnot

    • [deleted]

    • Post #2

    What kind of proxy do you use?
    Can you test without using the proxy?
    Does the page eventually timeout or just it just hang forever? (more than a few minutes)

      we're using winproxy at our office. we have 5 machines on a wireless network sharing a 56k dial-up connection through winproxy.

      upon your suggestion, i plugged a laptop directly into the phone line and dialed up.

      same problem, and it just hangs forever. only shutting down IE with ctrl-alt-del works.

      the laptop i just used for testing froze the first time i tried, so i cleared the browser history and cache and got it to successfully load. once.

      a noteworthy observation: i'm a bit confused by the fact that purging the history and cache temporarily solved things on the laptop, since that was the first time i had ever used that machine to look at any part of my php site.

      i would think that it would have loaded fine the first time and then required cache purging, not the other way around.

      any further suggestions?

      thank you vincent.

      :-]

      -dolphinsnot

        • [deleted]

        • Post #5

        So you took a laptop that had never been used to view that page,
        and it failed at the first attempt, then you cleared the cache and it worked once,
        but a reload failed?

        How is the "temporary internet files" setting on that browser, does it refresh once per session, or every visit to the page, or automatic or what have you..

        Perhaps you can look at the webserver's logfiles to see which of the objects in that page is the last to be succesfully served.

        Just to nag you a little, I can load the page perfectly well on both IE and Netscape, on win2k.

        =8-)

          yes, that's what happened with the laptop.

          the 'temporary internet files' is set to the default of 'automatic', and i would prefer to get it all to work with default IE settings to avoid tech support calls to our 2-person team.

          my server logs show that the php file (www.mbinet.org/web/main/index.html) was the last thing to be processed before the crashes. no images, nothing but the script.

          i am working at home right now on my MacG3, and have no problems at all in Netscape or IE.5, regardless of cache settings. it's difficult for me to troubleshoot broken things in an environment where they work.

          task list for my winblows98 machine at work tomorrow:

          1. check to see if banner ad system might be causing touble because it sits in an <iframe>. i'll remove the tags and try again.

          2. check all possible browser 'temporary files' settings to see if one works, and if one is found figure out a <meta> or other work-around for proper caching.

          3. check to see if my NO-CACHE <meta> tag is causing troubles.

          4. research, research, research, and check back at phpbuilder.com to see if a solution awaits me.

          the best way to find a needle in a haystack is process of elimintation.

          thanks again.

          -dolphinsnot

            First of all... do you have active desktop turned on? If you do, shut it down.

            I've had a problem recently that can be related. Trying to set cookies in IE5.5 give me a cookie nightmare and one of the effects I got when I tried to use javascript to check the cookies was that the browser freezes.

            This might be a problem with the javascript code. You are using PHPLib's template.inc, and it tends to destroy the javascript code because of the {VARIABLE} marker in the templates.

            I got this stall problem only with IE 5.5, so maybe if you check how template.inc is parsing your code you could find something.
            In case your template.inc keeps your javascript code intact, please let me know how you did it, because I had to hack it to change the variable marker and be able to use javascripts with my templates!

              i managed to get the javascript to stay intact by altering a configuration line in template.inc that keeps all unfilled variables (everything in curly brackets that isn't defined stays as-is). fortunately i can afford the luxury of keeping all unfilled variables because i am in control of the database content, and make certain no varaible goes unfilled.

              i also had some luck reading a file containing javascript (script.js) into a $variable, and using that $variable in my template instead.

              aside from that, i think the only other way is to hack the variable markers ({}).

              as far as messing with activedesktop goes, i won't be able to try it out until i get back to my winblows machine at the office. besides, i want my site to work for everyone (all 80,000 hits a month) without having to tell them to alter their browser cache settings or turn their active desktop off. thanks for your input, but my problem still isn't solved.

              -dolphinsnot

                Write a Reply...