The connection was reset
 The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
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That's a temporary failure. Most likely load related. Most likely due to daily maintenance tasks. Most likely due to mysql on FreeBSD.

- tye        

10+ years and still going strong :) Did you see next years entry? Revisiting FreeBSD vs. Linux for MySQL (by Jeremy Zawodny)

I haven't been able to load Cool Uses for about a week now -- but can load other pages such as "Seekers of Perl Wisdom", "Recently Active Threads" and "Perl Monks Discussion" etc. The "The Monastery Gates" is another link that doesn't load.

Works for me at 6 am, GMT (using FF20-Win7).

UPDATE: In case it matters, I'm connecting through www.perlmonks.org and the link is Cool%20Uses%20for%20Perl.

This is an old problem that only triggers if all of the following happen at once:

• The request is handled by a specific PM web server
• A node on the page uses <spoiler> tags
• Inside of the <spoiler> tags are <code> tags
• The code is over 32kB or expands to over 32kB when expanded (maybe?) because...
• The viewing user has a complex "Code Prefix" configured (or similar)
• At least one other condition that I have not yet identified (perhaps related to how recently Apache has been restarted?)

And then what happens is that the Apache child dies due to "illegal instruction".

See also Re^5: "Invisible" nodes (details) (which includes an example thread that isn't currently failing for me even though I'm currently able to trigger the failure via other means).

Note that trying to combine all of those items together outside of Apache doesn't generate even a warning nor invalid results, even on the same version of Perl that Apache claims to have been linked against. Also note I've yet to figure out any way to get the failing case to tell me any hint about which of the many lines of code involved is where the failure happens (so I could just change it somewhat randomly so that it does the same things but just stops dumping core in that version of Apache).

In the mean time, I replaced a few uses of <spoiler> tags that weren't being used to hide spoilers with <readmore> tags so Cool Uses for Perl should load for everybody no matter which web server they hit (until the next person does that again).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

(Updated a few times in fairly minor ways after posting)

FWIW, I think Testing Methodology exhibits the same/similar problem (connection reset)

That was a good one. It had almost a full 64kB of text inside of the spoiler tags and so failed extra often (even sometimes, but not always, on other web servers).

So I found a possible culprit in an overly complex regex and I think the problem is completely gone now. Hard to say that with complete confidence when the problem can be so inconsistent in whether or not it happens, of course.

- tye        

sg:

I'm seeing the same behavior. I've tried at about 6:30AM and just a couple of seconds ago.

Firefox 11.0, Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical 1.0.

$ uname -a
Linux Boink 2.6.32-39-generic #86-Ubuntu SMP Mon Feb 13 21:47:32 UTC 2
+012 i686 GNU/Linux
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Update: In the two weeks since tye reported a fix, I've been unable to reproduce the problem. And it was *very* repeatable before then. Huzzah!

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

I am using IE 9 on Windows 7 64 bit. I haven't been able to load Cool Uses for about a week now -- but can load other pages such as "Seekers of Perl Wisdom", "Recently Active Threads" and "Perl Monks Discussion" etc. The "The Monastery Gates" is another link that doesn't load. Can you load the Monastery Gates?