Premature End of Script Headers Error

[iford]

We have been seeing this more and more lately not sure what the issue really is as the apache logs for the site only say " Premature end of script headers: thankyou.cgi," is there a way to turn on more logging for this in Shopsite?

On an average we are getting 2 - 3 of these a day and there is no rhyme or reason to why were are getting them the users are different, products are different and billing and shipping are different so basically all the usual suspects seem fine.

Currently using v10sp2

[Jim]

The "Premature end of script" error is just a generic message from the web server that something went wrong during the execution of the process.

Something like that can happen for a number of reasons, the shopper closing their browser before the process completes, bad network connection dropping the line, cgi's of the wrong version used to patch the store, a server that is running slow and not allowing the process to complete- thus ending the process early, etc.

Since the version you are using, v10sp2, is several years old I recommend that you upgrade to the latest version 11 sp2 r4. If the problem still persists then we could view the core files that are created an see what is happening. We can't do that with older version because we have to have a debug version of the exact same build that the store is using so the debug statements match the code.

[iford]

Totally understand its an older version at this time due to the new authorization methods for external scripts to access orders we have not been able to upgrade yes I know we can turn it to basic auth as well but would like to use the new ACL so we can give access to different users with in the company to get data.

That being said there is no rhyme or reason for these errors one our testers can not duplicate the issue and two they are so random its not even funny. It would be nice if Shopsite had some logging to determine if there were any issue and using the custom-dump.pl results in no issues at all. Just seems odd to me.

We will be upgrading in the near future but until then this issue will persist which is a problem.

[Jim]

Random problem would generally be server related since the ShopSite code is not changing. What kind of a server is the store running on? Is it sharing the server with lots of other websites? What is the time out limit set for processes? Is there anything in common with the different crashes?

If it can't be reproduced by specific steps there is no way to know where the problem might be.