Hi all,

Last week, I discovered a bug in Apache httpd’s mod_cgi. Basically, it means that mod_cgi does not timeout until 2x the duration of TimeOut, while mod_proxy_http (used by Plack) times out after 1x the duration of TimeOut.

You can see the details at https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=26400.

The Apache community worked very quickly, and together we’ve resolved the bug, but I don’t think Apache backport fixes.  

That said, there’s been an open bug report in Debian for 5 years (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=780123). I’ll send an email in telling them that this has been fixed upstream. I wouldn’t count on a backport though.

In any case, the real importance here is that we harmonize people’s expectations. With Bug 15218, we started using CGI mode for certain long-running processes. It might be that this isn’t 100% necessary in all cases, if we just increase the ProxyTimeout to match the effective TimeOut time of CGI processes.

David Cook

Software Engineer

Prosentient Systems

72/330 Wattle St

Ultimo, NSW 2007

Australia

Office: 02 9212 0899

Online: 02 8005 0595