[ic] Session Dropping in High and Low Traffic SOLVED

[Michael Goldfarb]

Thanks to everyone for all of the help with this issue and sorry again that 
I cannot follow the string of comments, but we have found the cause of our 
session problems.

The problem turned out not to be related to Interchange at all but rather 
the HTML/JavaScript if you will believe that.  The issue was related to 
preloading images for purposes of image mouseovers.  When the JavaScript 
interpreter told the browser to load images and the image URIs were not 
properly prepended with a beginning "/" (so that it did not reference the 
images by the document root of the site - but instead sent the request 
through Interchange) it would send a rapid sequence of GET requests for 
pages that did not exist.  Once this happened enough (I am assuming there 
is some threshold setting in Interchange), it resulted in this error in the 
error log:

WARNING: POSSIBLE BAD ROBOT. 106 accesses with no 30 second pause.

Interchange dropped session because of this we think.  It was hard to reach 
this conclusion because this site was for a client who had in the past run 
a link checker several times on the site so this error was overlooked AND 
the error messages did not always coincide (from a timing standpoint) with 
session being dropped.

Adding a "/" in the JavaScript preloader fixed this problem just fine ;-)

Thanks for all the extra help.  We apologize for this false alarm.