Upload Timeout Issue Under Apache/Perl

Question

Our site provides a upload form for our members to upload photos which we then store and allow them to share. We use a simple form POST to enable the upload and then process the files with Perl's CGI.pm. Here is our Apache setup:

Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635

For some reason small percentage of our users are running into an issue where the upload times out and fails. Here is what is reported in our Apache logs on failure:

(104)Connection reset by peer: Error reading request entity data, referer: http://domain.com/upload/photo

At first we thought that it might be due to not having the $CGI::POST_MAX set too low so large photos were being rejected. Even after increasing this to 100 MB it is still occurring. We can't replicate the issue and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which users are running into problems since it's happening in different browsers, operating systems, etc. We're also not sure if it's an issue related to Perl or to our Apache settings.

I'd appreciate any advice on what might be causing this to happen and suggestions on how to resolve the problem. Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

"Connection reset by peer" often indicates the user stopped waiting for the upload to complete by hitting stop or navigating away.