zlib output bug

[Vinnie]

After enabling output compression under IIS 5.0 (by copying php_zlib.dll into the php directory and turning on the appropriate extension line in php.ini) there is a strange bug.

The home page of my forum corrupts itself after a "refresh" in the browser.

The initial display is correct, but pressing control-R or F5 in IE causes the page to look screwed up. I view the source, and it appears that a big chunk of the header is missing.

Has anyone seen this or have a fix?

[Chris Schreiber]

What version of PHP are you running and how is it running with IIS (ISAPI or CGI?).

[Vinnie]

IIS5

IIS 5.0 under Windows 2000 Advanced Server

PHP 4.0.5 as a cgi .exe

[Vinnie]

Update

I turned the "GZip" compression level down to ZERO in the admin control panel for vBulletin and the problem still happens.

I narrowed it down to the line in the php.ini file which specifies the php_zlib.dll file as an extension.

Commenting out the line causes the problem to go away, while un-commenting the line causes the problem to appear.

The line in question is:
extension=php_zlib.dll

[Mike Sullivan]

Don't turn down compression, turn it off to test.

Although I believe someone else posted this a while back and I think it was a strange server issue (or was it IE? I forget).

[Chris Schreiber]

It's possible there's a bug in the php_zlib.dll file, maybe someone on the PHP/Windows mailing list might have some ideas.

[Vinnie]

buggy

You can see it at my forum, I just went live:

http://www.bearshare.net

[Chris Schreiber]

Congratulations on going live.... I did see the problem, it seems if I click on any links to pull up the index.php or type it in it works fine... it's just when you refresh it cuts off some of the html at the beginning of the page... very strange.

[Chris Schreiber]

What browser are you using? I was able to duplicate the problem with IE 6 beta... but I just tried your site with Netscape 6 and it worked perfectly doing refreshes.

[Vinnie]

Thanks

Hey thanks! What do you think? I would say this was the most heavily customized template anyone has ever done, because I looked for other sites that took it to the edge but most of it was color changes and image swapping.

If you spot any loose ends please let me know.

As for the browser, I'm using IE 5.5

Yes it is freakin WEIRD I agree totally, I can't imagine why a refresh would cause that.

Maybe I have to change the "header" output options in the admin CP?

[bira]

I have the exact same problem on my forums. I'm on linux with php4.0.5.

It happens only if you refresh a page, and in my BB's case it seems to happen only to users (myself included) who visit the website via proxy.

I added an option for the users to turn off gzip compression in their CP because of that.

[bira]

btw I forgot to mention that I have the exact same problem here, on the vbulletin.com forums, when I surf via proxy.

I use IE 5.5 sp1