[ic] AOL customer unable to order

John1 list_subscriber at yahoo.co.uk
Tue May 31 10:00:52 EDT 2005


An AOL customer recently informed us that they were unable to place an 
order - when they clicked the "Buy" button their browser just appeared to 
hang and they were never taken to the checkout page.

On inspecting our web server log for this customer I found the following:

172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:22 POST /order.html      HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:22 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:22 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:23 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:23 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:23 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:23 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:23 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:23 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:24 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:24 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
172.215.213.148 31/05/05 13:01:24 GET /ord/basket.html HTTP/1.1 302 
http://www.myinterchangesite.com/mysku123.html
...
...
repeated about 2500 times in about 8 minutes, i.e. about 5 GETs per second!

Incidentally, the user agent string was "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; 
Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Advanced Searchbar)"

Can anyone cast any light on why this customer had trouble placing an order, 
and why their browser appears to be resubmitting the GET request for 
/ord/basket.html about 4 times a second.  I know that AOL puts proxy servers 
between their customers and the internet.  Could the proxy servers be 
confused by the Status 302?  BTW, we are using Interchange 
5.3.0-200408290658.  Is this purely a client agent/AOL issue, or is their 
anything we can do at the server end to avoid this problem?  Any ideas would 
be appreciated.

Thanks,

John 



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