[webkit-dev] Desperate for webkit help

[David Kilzer]

Hi Mark,

The best thing you could do is to file a bug on <https://bugreport.apple.com/>
and attach source for a project that reproduces the issue, along with details
steps to reproduce the issue.  If you don't have an Apple Developer Connection
(ADC) membership, sign up for a free "online" membership using
<https://connect.apple.com/>.

The second thing you should do is to install Wireshark (a packet sniffer) on OS
X and use it to capture the traffic being sent back and forth to the server
when the bug occurs.  (Since this generally requires either GTK built for Cocoa
or X11 to be installed--and using MacPorts or Fink to build it from source--it
may be easier to capture the traffic using "tcpdump" and copying that file to
another platform where you may install a pre-built Wireshark binary.  Hmm...I
guess there is a Wireshark binary for Intel Macs linked off the Downloads page
now.)

http://www.wireshark.org/
http://www.macports.org/
http://fink.sourceforge.net/

I would recommend attaching the tcpdump output to the bug created on
bugreport.apple.com as well.  This is roughly the command you want to run (from
a Terminal) to capture the output on OS X if you don't use Wireshark directly:

sudo tcpdump -s 0 -w packets.tcpdump -i en0

Finally, this kind of sounds like the issue described in this bug on
bugs.webkit.org:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5760#c38

If you know enough about the TCP/IP protcol, you should be able to see this
issue happening with the tcpdump packet trace.

Note that the behavior of this keep-alive timeout issue can vary depending on
how "far away" the server is from your client.  I think servers on a local
network (or subnet) display this behavior much easier than hitting a "remote"
server.

Hope that helps!

Dave


Mark <hoicem at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hi. I've been developing a cocoa application based around webkit for the
> last 18 months. It's an auto form filling/submitting tool primarily designed
> for adult webmasters to submit their free pages to link lists. (If this is
> an problem I guess you can stop reading now)...
> Currently development has grinded to a complete hault because of a webkit
> issue that we just can't work round. We first noticed the issue with the
> release of Safari 3 but it still exists in the last nightly build of webkit.
> The issue is this: imagine a simple html form. The form is like so and the
> user filled data is in brackets:
> 
> Name: (mark)
> Email: (whatever at qwerty123456.com)
> Url: (http://www.google.com)
> 
> Now if we submit this form in Safari/Webkit, 40-50% of the time the web
> script will throw up an 'invalid email' or 'invalid url' message. At first
> you think 'oh, I must have entered data incorrectly' but clicking back, data
> looks fine. Submit same data again, second time round it submits fine!
> 
> It seems to happen totally at random, it's like the data visible in the form
> fields (ie, the user entered data) is not being passed onto the form when
> submit is pressed. It worked fine prior to safari 3 and we know it's a
> webkit issue because it only occurs in our app/safari/webkit. Other browsers
> submit the same data perfectly each time to the exact same html forms.
> 
> It's very hard to nail down. Sometimes it will submit fine first time,
> sometimes if it fails first time, it can fail second time and then succeed
> third time. You just have to keep submitting the same data until it works.
> 
> Can anyone please help with this? It's kinda killed our application and as
> the title suggests I'm *desperate* for it to be fixed.
> 
> kindest regards
> 
> mark