Wacky IE Problem

[Martin Atkins]

Hi folks,

I've been having a problem that I'm finding quite hard to debug. I have 
Perlbal deployed at my office in a selector/reverse-proxy setup which 
proxies back to a different host depending on the Host header. This has 
been working fine for a couple of months now, but a few days ago we 
encountered a very bizarre problem.

One of the servers behind the proxy is a demo of a project we're working 
on. One of the pages it returns contains a large HTML table.

When making the request for this page in Internet Explorer through 
Perlbal, IE recieves most of the response but then suddenly and 
inexplicably switches to either a "Page cannot be displayed" or a "Page 
has expired" error. Which error gets displayed seems to be random. Since 
it happens part-way through the response, my first instinct was that it 
was a client-side problem.

However, making that same request using IE on our LAN here directly to 
the server does not show the same problem. Also, arranging for our 
router to translate a port to the server directly and making a request 
to that from outside the network using IE does not show the problem. We 
have two servers running the application here and the problem occurs 
regardless of which one Perlbal is pointing at. It seems that Perlbal is 
at least a factor if not the direct cause.

I did some packet sniffing and noticed a load of RST packets being 
generated as the requests end, and recalled a post Brad made in his 
journal a while back about that issue. I hacked Perlbal::Socket to set 
the SO_LINGER flag on the socket and that caused the torrent of RST to 
go away but does not solve the problem. The packet sniff shows that the 
data is transmitted in its entirety.

Just to make it all the more bizarre, the problem seems to occur 
regardless of the size of the response, except in some cases where the 
number of columns in our table is less than a certain number. If it 
stays below that number of columns, it can return as many rows as it 
likes (within reason) and work just fine. However, this might just be 
random dumb luck since it works occasionally anyway.

I'm completely at a loss. This problem is so completely off-the-wall I 
don't know where to start! Any ideas? :)

We're running Perlbal 1.37.