[Phplib-users] Odd PHPlib WebApp Problem

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Greetings All,

I am having a strange problem with a phplib-based database application.  It 
uses phplib for database abstraction, authentication, and templating.  The 
system generates a summary table view of the database, currently about 600 
records and there are about 100 users, located all over the country, all on 
different broadband providers, with maybe 20 or so on at any given time.

The table is complicated enough that the users need the column headers 
reproduced every 5 or 10 records to make it usable.  Originally, I was 
generating this view entirely using nested templates.  The view took way 
too long to load - over 80 seconds - and monopolized the server's CPU for 
the entire time.  Several users even had timeout problems waiting for the 
page to load.  Benchmarking revealed almost all of that time was spent in 
the section that output the column headers every few records.

So, I re-wrote the table display routine without templates and got the load 
time down for that view to about 10 seconds - MUCH better.  The HTML sent 
to the users' browsers is identical to when I was using phplib templates 
(compared with diff).  It is long (6000+ lines) but, it validates as 100% 
standards-compliant HTML 4.01 with HTML Tidy.  However, now, around 10-15% 
of the users cannot load that view.  When they try, they get a blank page 
(view source shows "<html><body></body></html>").

The system also has a search feature that uses the same script and outputs 
the same view but, with returned records limited by the search parameters - 
generally, 10-40 records instead of the full list of ~600.  The users who 
cannot see the full view CAN do a search and see the results set.

It doesn't seem to be browser-specific.  I have tested on more than a dozen 
different browsers on three platforms here and cannot reproduce the 
error.  I have been able to verify the problem on a couple specific users' 
systems using remote-control software and confirmed that they have the same 
issue in IE and Netscape Navigator.  It sounds like it will be 
cost-prohibitive to do any major re-installations, re-configurations, or 
system swaps on the user end to try to determine whether the problem is 
specific to the configurations of those machines or to their service providers.

The users like the full list view for a number of tasks and aren't really 
gung-ho to have me break the results table up into multiple pages (which 
seems like the surest, quickest fix).  However, I am hard-pressed to 
explain why more than 1/10th of the users are unable to load the page with 
the new display code.

Has anyone run into anything like this?  Any guesses about what is 
happening or how to stop it from happening?

Andrew Crawford
ph...@ev...  