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36

answers:

1

Hi,

We've recently upgraded our production systems from Java 1.5, Apache HTTPD 1.3 and Tomcat (sorry, not sure which version) to Java 1.6, Apache HTTPD 2.2 and the latest version of Tomcat (again, sorry, not sure of the numbers).

Since this upgrade, we've noticed that a (very) small percentage of traffic to our site from IE7 and IE8 drops one of our cookies. The session cookie is always sent back, but sometimes, the cookie which determines which of our otherwise-load-balanced servers to send the request to, is missing.

We can find no explanation for this and can only guess that there's something different in our Apache config which is causing this behaviour, but why only on IE7 and IE8, and then only very infrequently, we've no idea.

I know I haven't provided much information to go on, but if anyone has ever heard of this or similar happening, please do let me know what you did about it! Or if anyone has particularly in depth knowledge of the vagaries of IE cookie handling and can provide some insight, please do!

One thing I can say is that I don't think it's anything to do with the underscore-in-domain-name issue I've been reading so much about these past couple of days.

Thanks, Andy.

A: 

You can try -

  1. Find out browser's cookies total size limitation, something like ~4K (i am not sure)
  2. Using Fiddler verify that the web browser is sending cookies and they are dropped by web-server, or the IE itself is not sending cookies.
  3. Make sure your cookies are actually sent to browser (and not overwritten by some part of code)? Use Fiddler.

- ankit

Ankit Jain
Thanks, I'll investigate this "Fiddler" thing of which you speak... ;-) One problem that I forgot to mention is - although we have had enough independently reported cases to be sure that it's happening, we don't have enough information to be able to replicate the issue. We only know that it's happening sometimes on some versions of IE7 and IE8.
AndyB