Go to page, broken. Hit refresh, works. IE only

When I open my server URL I get a blank or broken page. I click refresh and the page loads fine. Continue browsing and the site works fine.

WinXP/IE6 - first page loads blank.
Vista Pre-RC1/IE7 - first page is loads only 24.5 lines of html out of 109.
Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 beta - no problems.

This seems to be session related because it happens only on first connection in a new browser window. If i connect to a non-modx page on the server first and then modx it still happens.

IE 6 headers:

===================================================
GET /modx/ HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Tablet PC 1.7; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.2)
Host: hidden for now
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: QuickEditHideLinks=null; QE_PositionTop=0; QE_PositionLeft=0; MODxLoggingCookie=305598988

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2006 17:22:24 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.4
P3P: CP="NOI NID ADMa OUR IND UNI COM NAV"
Set-Cookie: SN44f3450a8fd73=0f08be16992f8a65b15a8c237c83253a; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 3093
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
===================================================

It says Content-Length: 3093, but there’s no content, or IE is getting conflicting headers.

Need to know more about your server and versions of everything you’re running and what’s on the page.

MODx 0.9.2.1 (rev 1005)

Simple template without any snippets.

Content of home page: "Hello world"

Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)
PHP/5.0.4

Friendly URL’s turned on.

Hi dylan,

Do you have zlib.output_compression enabled in your .htaccess file? If so, try commenting it out and let me know if does anything to solve the problem. (It’s been known to cause a few issues with IE caching)

Cheers,
Garry

Yes, it was enabled.

I disabled and it worked.

Is there a fix for this? I don’t want to leave compression off.



Also - after doing that I get the following error on first page load only. If this isn’t enough information let me know where I should look or how i can turn more verbose error logging on.


« MODx Parse Error »
MODx encountered the following error while attempting to parse the requested resource:
« PHP Parse Error »

PHP error debug
Error: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/html/modx/manager/includes/document.parser.class.inc.php:466)
Error type/ Nr.: Warning - 2
File: /var/www/html/modx/manager/includes/document.parser.class.inc.php
Line: 430
Line 430 source: header($header);

Parser timing
MySQL: 0.1246 s s (5 Requests)
PHP: 0.0499 s s
Total: 0.1745 s s

Hi Dylan,

The problem with the zlib compression is an IE issue so there’s not a lot that can be done on that score, to be honest.

Regarding the error, try disabling the visitor logging (found in the Manager Configuration panel) - that generally works as a workaround for it. There a lot of problems/issues around the current Visitor Logging features and future versions of MODx will see them being removed altogether.

Thanks again for the quick response.

Since zlib compression works on all other platforms works with IE it must be something PHP’s zlib library is doing differently. Maybe they’re following the spec perfectly, but if 90% of our users out there are to get a broken experience then it’s up to php zlib compression developers to figure out what everybody else is doing so that it works. We know Microsoft isn’t going to bend backwards to fix this problem.

I’m surprised the solution to the other problem is to disable this otherwise nice feature. Any suggestions for alternative integrated live visitor tracking?

I’ve disabled tracking. I’m using Google Analytics, but I don’t find it as helpful as an integrated tool.