CakePHP sending multiple lines of same cookie information in response header. why??

Question

Hi all, I am having this problem with one of my cakePHP applications. My application displays a big html table on the page. I noticed that when the table goes beyond a certain size limit, IE cannot display that page. While trying to figure out why this happens, I noticed that my html response header contains a HUGE number of lines repeating the same thing.

Response Headers
------------------------------
Date    Thu, 20 May 2010 04:18:10 GMT
Server  Apache/2.0.63 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.7m PHP/5.2.10
X-Powered-By    PHP/5.2.10
P3P CP="NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM"

Set-Cookie  CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp 
CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp

Keep-Alive  timeout=15, max=100
Connection  Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding   chunked
Content-Type    text/html


==========================================================================
Request Headers
--------------------------
Host    localhost:8080
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept  text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive  115
Connection  keep-alive
Referer http://localhost:8080/mywebapp/section2/bigtable/1
Cookie  CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1
Authorization   Basic cGt1bWFyYTpwa3VtYXJh

Notice the huge set of repeated lines at 'Set-Cookie' in the Response Header. This only happens when I try to display large tables. Does anyone have any clue to what might be causing this? Any help to find the issue is appreciated.

I am using CakePHP 1.2.5. As far as I know, I am not messing with any set cookie functions. But yes I am using session variables.

Answer 1

Are you using requestAction()? Then https://dev.cakephp.org/ticket/2886 might describe your problem.

I had a similar problem, where the Set-Cookie header was repeated three times, apparently because the session was started both by SessionComponent and SessionHelper. I solved it by setting Session.start to false in config/core.php and then calling $this->Session->activate() once manually in AppController->beforeFilter().

Edit: Also see http://cakeqs.org/eng/questions/view/session_internals.