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Dealing with apache timeout in Perl

+1 vote
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In my web-app there is a HTML screen which provides the facility to select and download documents. If user selects some documents (using checkbox) and submits the form then then all of his selected documents gets downloaded in form of a zip file. What I do is that I take users selected documents and then use Archive::Zip to create Zip file. It works fine.

But if the user had selected a lot of documents then the create_zip subroutine takes a lot of time, and if it takes more than 4 minutes (240 seconds) then apache timeout occurs causing the 503 error, but in the backend the subroutine keeps doing the job, but due to the timeout I cant send the created zip file to users browser.

I am confused how to solve this problem.

posted Sep 4, 2013 by Satish Mishra

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2 Answers

+1 vote

You need to fix this in Apache not in your web-app. The setting is called TimeOut in your httpd.conf - this is the number of seconds Apache will wait before sending a timeout error and ending the request.

answer Sep 4, 2013 by Bob Wise
Sorry I cant do that. Isnt there any other way?
commented Sep 5, 2013 by anonymous
+1 vote

If you don't have control of the web server you're going to have to get creative. Instead of returning the zip file from the page that processes the request, you could:

ok - Fork a process to build the zip and place it in a location specific to the user or their session then return a page with a link to that location and a warning that the link may not work for a few minutes

better - If you're comfortable with javascript (or meta-refresh at a pinch), you could fork the process, then return a page that tells the user that their request is in progress, then periodically refresh the results page until the zip is available.

answer Sep 5, 2013 by Ahmed Patel
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