Paypal option Causing slow check out and CGI Errors

[BPJ553]

I’ve been working with actinic support to try and find a solution to an unusual problem but it is very, very slow going. In fact I get the feeling it’s not important to them. So I thought I would ask actinics 'other' support team to see if you can help!

The problem is as follows – When I add Paypal Website Payments as an additional payment option the checkout doesn’t work properly. The ‘Add to Cart’ button hangs sometimes for 15 seconds before going to the ‘confirm’ page and finally adding the product. The ‘checkout now’ button hangs and then gets the following error.

A General Script Error Occurred
________________________________________
Error: ./acatalog/86Z185Z67Z17A1289403622B5592.session can not be locked during Session init!
________________________________________
Press the Browser back button and try again or contact the site owner


Basically, everything to do with the checkout and cart doesn’t work properly. Remove PayPal and everything is ok.

After 2 weeks and lots of chasing up, support uploaded my snapshot to their test server and it works ok there end. I have a feeling they are going to tell me to ‘purge and refresh’, but that has never fixed anything in the past and is a major ordeal for us.

After searching I found post number 8 here http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=48529 to have had a similar problem. They moved host which solved the problem.

I don’t really understand post 9. Could this be the reason? Anyone else come across this before?

Thanks!

[Mike Hughes]

Both post 8 and 9 suggest it could be a server problem.

Are you running on a unix or windows server? Post 9 refers to IIS which is Microsofts Internet Service.

Mike

[BPJ553]

Thanks for that. I have the specs of the server here

Microsoft windows server 2003 IIS6
Perl v5.10.0 build 1004 [287188]

I do believe it must be something to do with the server set up as plenty of people use paypal ok - but knowing what to do to fix it is hard

[Mike Hughes]

The last post in that thread does refer to an IIS 6 problem but you appear to have the perl version they recommend so I'm not sure where we go from here.

The reported problems suggest it's likely to be something in the Actinic perl scripts with paypal enabled that upsets IIS servers. What that problem might be I can't tell but the error is complaining that the session file can't be locked which is usually due to permission problems.

The problem with file permissions and scripts is that the scripts can have different 'ownership' rights and that can make it doubly hard to identify the problem.

My suggestion would be to move host (or move server with the same host). In general, a UNIX server is easier to manage when using Actinic than a Windows server.

Mike

[chickenhouseman]

i had exactly the same problem. Actinic couldn't help as it worked on their test servers. My host told me it wasn't their problem, they we even selling actinic at the time.

In short, i changed hosts, problem gone.

[BPJ553]

hmmm.. I think you are right. I don't really want to chage host because they are really helpful and support is 1st class. But it does seem more problematic on microsft servers. Decisions, decisions.

[BPJ553]

I got an email solution from Actinic support yesterday with instructions on how to fix it.

I have not tried this so don't know if it will work. (I've just signed up for a UNIX server as I wasn't confident of a fix and then this solution turns up the next day!)

For anyone else with this problem here is what I have been asked to do.

===================================
Description: Adding PayPal slows down site
Solution:

Edit 'Session.pm (from your site folder) as follows

* Search for 'sub GetSessionFileName' you will see...

sub GetSessionFileName
{
my $Self = shift;
my $sID = shift;
my $sPath = $Self->GetSessionFileFolder(); return ($sPath . $sID . '.session'); }

* Insert the following after this ...

sub DESTROY
{
my $Self = shift;
$Self->{_LOCKER}->Unlock()
}

* Save and exit the file
* Copy the Session.pm file to C:\Program Files\Actinic v10\Original

* Update the site.