Bad Request (Request Header Too Long)

[_dobbo_]

I'm getting this error a lot when I click on news items on the front page.

No proxy or upstream systems between me and PH - I get the PH favicon displayed in the address bar so the error is definately coming from a PH server.

[RacingPete]

Is it possible to send me a copy of the header for the page, if you can, and then I can have a look where the problem may be happening?

If not, then is this happening on a particular news story, or randomly?

[_dobbo_]

I've been getting the error all morning - as soon as I fire up WireShark and set up a packet trace it stops doing it altogether.

It was happening on random stories, a refresh would fix it. In the absence of being able to reproduce the error I'll shuffle away mumbling to myself.

[_dobbo_]

Spoke too soon - got it this time - I've sent this via email with the cookie intact.

GET /news/default.asp?storyId=18926 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.pistonheads.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.pistonheads.com/
Cookie: <deleted>



HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:21:47 GMT
Content-Length: 46
Age: 4166
X-Cache: HIT from squid
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from squid:80
Via: 1.0 squid:80 (squid)
Connection: close


<h1>Bad Request (Request Header Too Long)</h1>

Edited by _dobbo_ on Tuesday 4th November 13:27

[[AJ]]

I'm getting this same error now. The website was fine for me this morning and around lunch time though.

[RacingPete]

We haven't changed anything on our side... I will have a word with our hosting company and see if anything has changed to our front end caching servers that maybe causing this problem.

[miniman]

Isn't the above snippet also an example of the "random other person's username" issue? Can't see why that page would get a hit from Squid as it includes the username which **should** make it unique per user.

[_dobbo_]

I *think* squid is basically a reverse caching proxy server. The problem I'd guess is that squid is caching a bad result and returning that to subsequent visitors. Either that or squid itself is causing the problem.

[miniman]

Yep we had the same problem with our Squid boxes where they were serving a cached page when they shouldn't (in fact it was precisely the same symptoms - someone elses username displayed). However the problem went away when we forced a Pragma:no-cache into the headers but this doesn't seem to have worked here.

[RacingPete]

miniman said:

Isn't the above snippet also an example of the "random other person's username" issue? Can't see why that page would get a hit from Squid as it includes the username which **should** make it unique per user.

The example code snippet is for the news pages, which don't have to be unique to each user, though it isn't one of the pages that should be caching so I need to see why that is.

[miniman]

RacingPete said:

The example code snippet is for the news pages, which don't have to be unique to each user, though it isn't one of the pages that should be caching so I need to see why that is.

That's what I thought initially, however the news page does still have the username / link to profile at the top right which I guess makes it unique. Plus the comment count and last comment username will mean it's at least hard to cache, although not impossible.

[RacingPete]

miniman said:

That's what I thought initially, however the news page does still have the username / link to profile at the top right which I guess makes it unique. Plus the comment count and last comment username will mean it's at least hard to cache, although not impossible.

The news page shouldn't be cached due to those issues you mention so have to see why it was for that broken header as I am getting MISS from Squid on my testing here for news pages.

[ben d]

Hi,

I've been recently getting this error when I click on the Forums link from the homepage when using my Mac (Safari browser) at home. Never seem to get it in the Office when running IE7. A full reset of Safari including cache and all cookies seems to address the problem temporarily, but it is a pain....

[RacingPete]

ben d said:

Hi,

I've been recently getting this error when I click on the Forums link from the homepage when using my Mac (Safari browser) at home. Never seem to get it in the Office when running IE7. A full reset of Safari including cache and all cookies seems to address the problem temporarily, but it is a pain....

Let me know if it appears again after the reset, am intrigued by this error and to get to the bottom of it as I can't reproduce it in the office or at home.