[ic] Googlebot Getting 500 Errors ... but he's the only one

[Kevin Walsh]

Jonathon Sim [jonathonsim at zeald.com] wrote:
> Hrm.  We once had something similar to this happening on our servers : it
> turned out to be a bug in mod_interchange caused by the
> "if-modified-since" headers that google sends (this bug also affected
> safari).  Since google only sends it when the last attempt it made
> succeded, google would alternately succeed and fail each time it  tries
> to access a page. 
> 
> You can see if thats the problem your seeing by running this perl script
> with: perl test_google_bug.pl http://yoursite.com
> 
> [snip: Perl script]
> 
> if it returns :
> ok
> failed
> then you know thats the problem.  If so I have a patch I can send you (I
> think its been integrated in the mod_interchange)
>
I've run your test script against an Interchange 5.2 website, with the
current mod_interchange (version 1.32), and don't get any errors:

    1..2
    ok 1 - check http status is 200 without if-modified-since header
    ok 2 - check http status is not 500 with if-modified-since header (status is 200)

I don't recall seeing a patch for a problem related to the
"if-modified-since" HTTP header, although I could be mistaken.  If you
send me your patch, I'll compare it with the current code and see if
changes need to be made.

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