Upload Timeout Issue Under Apache/Perl

Question

Our site provides a upload form for our members to upload photos which we then store and allow them to share. We use a simple form POST to enable the upload and then process the files with Perl's CGI.pm. Here is our Apache setup:

Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635

For some reason small percentage of our users are running into an issue where the upload times out and fails. Here is what is reported in our Apache logs on failure:

(104)Connection reset by peer: Error reading request entity data, referer: http://domain.com/upload/photo

At first we thought that it might be due to not having the $CGI::POST_MAX set too low so large photos were being rejected. Even after increasing this to 100 MB it is still occurring. We can't replicate the issue and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which users are running into problems since it's happening in different browsers, operating systems, etc. We're also not sure if it's an issue related to Perl or to our Apache settings.

I'd appreciate any advice on what might be causing this to happen and suggestions on how to resolve the problem. Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

You can try to increase "Timeout" setting in Apache's config in case it's just the network having slowness spikes.

Also, please see this: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00457.html - there might be a 64MB limit according to that post though I don't see any corroborating evidence.

Also, see this example on how to set read limit: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.mod-perl/24260