[White Knight]

Originally Posted by replicon

Wow. I didn't think there were so many people having problems with this. I have a fix for pretty much everything that's mentioned in this thread, lag, weather not working, blank page... . Here's the technical description of what happened and why.

I stumbled upon the lag issue on the main page a few months back. It was fairly rare, approx. 5% of the hits to the main page which had the weather it would basically hang php completely affecting all the PHP pages on the server anytime someone checked the weather or hit the main page. It progressively got worse and worse. Like most of you guys, I took out the weather from the main page as a quick fix.

I pulled up a network sniffer to see what was going on between PHP and msnbc (which hosts the weather component). I noticed that sometimes it'd hit an IIS5 server, and sometimes, it'd hit an IIS6 server, which would hang the page. Looks like they were slowly rolling out Windows 2003 servers to their msnbc web server clusters, and whenver PHP requests the weather from the component and it (randomly) went to an upgraded IIS6/Win2K3 server, it'd hang.

Used my browser (IE) to hit the weather component page, and sniffed those packets. Works fine on IIS5 and IIS6. Compared the packets and noticed the difference. The vbWeather script was terminiating the request with 2 LF's (\n). IE terminated the requests with 2 CRLF's (\r\n). The HTTP standard defines the sequence CR LF as the end-of-line marker for all protocol elements except the entity-body. Meaning there was a bug in the weather.php code, which was allowed in IIS5, but because IIS6 is much stricter in RFC compliance, it sat there waiting for a proper end of line, which it never receives, so it just hangs there and does nothing.

OK there's the geeky tech description. Here's the fix.

In all your php files that access the weather, replace the line:

fputs($rawdata,"GET /m/chnk/d/weather_d_src.asp?acid=$usersettings[accid] HTTP/1.0\n\n");

with:

fputs($rawdata,"GET /m/chnk/d/weather_d_src.asp?acid=$usersettings[accid] HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n");

And your weather will be back up and running.

Here's the link to my site. Click F5 to refresh as much as you want, it'll never hang .

Beyond Car Forums

Enjoy.

Great Job! Works very well!