general/1140: spurious POST or PUT without Content-length errors

[doug salot <ds...@haggle.com>]

>Number:         1140
>Category:       general
>Synopsis:       spurious POST or PUT without Content-length errors
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    apache (Apache HTTP Project)
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   apache
>Arrival-Date:   Wed Sep 17 00:00:03 1997
>Originator:     dsalot@haggle.com
>Organization:
apache
>Release:        1.1.3
>Environment:
Linux 2.0.30
>Description:
I think this problem has been reported by others, but I always see
it closed out without a satisfactory answer.  My site gets about
100,000 hits per day and I get a few "POST or PUT without Content-length"
errors per hour.  The users who generate these errors are all
using mainstream browsers and they all report that repeated
attempts to POST form data basically hangs their browsers.
I'm guessing that the problem is related at least partially to
keep-alive, since it seems to be repeatable on a given connection.
>How-To-Repeat:
I have not been able to repeat this problem myself, and it happens
about 1 in 10,000 hits, so I have no idea how to repeat it.  It
can happen with any page that contains a form, such as
http://www.haggle.com/account.html
>Fix:
None.  Any ideas would be appreciated
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: