# Trust the CGI--post \*only\* once, please **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 15, 2000, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000 "2000-03-15T22:17:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Odieman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/a87d85/32.png) [@Odieman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odieman)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2000, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/41 "2000-04-19T18:09:00Z")
Leafless trees are the great unwashed mass of humanity, who are blindly focused on living rather than great ideological debates. Like all people who haven’t seen the light they have to pass through a period of capitalism (summer) before they realize that it is folly. Then they let their true colours shine (autumn). Then their masters get greedy and start repressing them (Winter). Then the whole cycle starts over again. Keith * * * “I’m tired of being an object of ridicule. I wanna be a figure of fear, respect, and SEX!” -Radar O’Reilly ---
**Author:** ![Gaudere](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e495f1/32.png) [@Gaudere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gaudere)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2000, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/42 "2000-05-04T16:58:24Z")
I’m moving this thread up since I’ve noticed an unusual number of multiposts considering the board hasn’t been crashing. I’d like to know: 1. Are new posts not showing up, so you repost and get a multipost? (in which case, trust the CGI! but I’ll mention it to the techs) 2. Is the screen timing out or going slow, so you hit submit a few more times? (in which case, trust the CGI! I don’t know if “going slow” is fixable.) 3. Are you only hitting submit once but you still get multiposts? (In which case, I should report the bug to the techs.) Let me know what’s going on here. I won’t flame you (_this_ time… 😉 ) if you tell me you hit submit more than once, but I’d like to know if this is a bug or just people getting impatient. ---
**Author:** ![Ptahlis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a8b319/32.png) [@Ptahlis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ptahlis)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2000, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/43 "2000-05-04T17:38:05Z")
> [@](#): > > \*\* > I’m moving this thread up since I’ve noticed an unusual number of multiposts considering the board hasn’t been crashing. I’d like to know: > > \*\* I did it. Guilty as charged for not trusting the CGI. As a newbie, I resubmitted when I got timeout errors and my post didn’t show up in a second window. Now I just cut and paste the text into notepad adn save it on the desktop. If it doesn’t show up eventually I know I still have it. Twice though, while still typing away at a message, all of a sudden my half finished post (in mid sentence no less!) just submitted itself. I have no idea how or why either. I haven’t seen any posts from others like this either, so it is something I did somehow. (Win98, IE5.0 for anyone else who has had this happen and can enlighten me.) ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2000, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/44 "2000-05-04T18:35:19Z")
The problem with ‘trusting the CGI’ is that the CGI is not trustworthy. HTTP connections can fail for lots of reasons without the CGI script firing. In my case, I double-posted because my first post generated an error from MY proxy server that the page could not be loaded. Now, that could happen either if your CGI script did not respond in time, or if my proxy server timed out, in which case you never got the message at all. So I fired up another browser instance and checked the page, and my message wasn’t there. So I submitted it again. Later in the day, there were two copies. CGI is a slow technology because it is out-of-process, but even so, some of these delays are pretty bad. It shouldn’t take a CGI module 2 minutes to respond after it receives a posting. You might want to look at your server configurations to make sure they are all correct. I don’t know how the SDMB is set up, but I’d look into increasing the available RAM and using a faster disk subsystem. ---
**Author:** ![Gaudere](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e495f1/32.png) [@Gaudere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gaudere)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2000, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/45 "2000-05-04T20:57:10Z")
See, that’s why I say “trust the CGI”; when you don’t you get multiposts, as I’ve been saying. 🙂 The people who have hit submit and _not_ had a post go through are very very rare, as far as I can tell. I realize it’s annoying to not see your post and wonder if it went through for a while, but it takes me a decent amount of time to clean multiposts up. Ed and the techs _do_ have various things planned that should reduce any delay problems (if you’d like to post your ideas for improving the speed, ATMB would be a good place), but in the meantime please be patient and not so quick to post again. It makes the threads cleaner and my job easier. ---
**Author:** ![mrblue92](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@mrblue92](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mrblue92)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2000, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/46 "2000-05-04T21:12:11Z")
Isn’t this something that could be fixed in the CGI itself? Why not compare the text in a post to the previous post from that particular member, and if it’s identical, toss it? Version 2.0, right? ---
**Author:** ![Gaudere](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e495f1/32.png) [@Gaudere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gaudere)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2000, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/47 "2000-05-04T21:21:05Z")
Ooh, cool idea. I’ll ask the tech guys, although I’m afraid that feature sounds to good to be true. (People sometimes make tiny changes to each post when they multipost, too, but at least it would get the great majority.) ---
**Author:** ![manhattan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/manhattan/32/7_2.png) [@manhattan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/manhattan)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2000, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/48 "2000-05-04T21:34:50Z")
As it happens, that exact feature is something that our software vendors hope to introduce on a future version of the program. So maybe this problem will eventually go away. hopehopehopehopehope ---
**Author:** ![David\_B](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/51bf81/32.png) [@David\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_B)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2000, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/49 "2000-05-04T23:41:12Z")
Gaudere said: > [@](#): > > but it takes me a decent amount of time to clean multiposts up And that doesn’t even include the ones that I quietly clean up, without so much as a complaint… 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2000, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/50 "2000-05-05T03:24:55Z")
The problem with CGI is that every call to a CGI program has to spawn a new process on the computer. This takes time. If the web site is on a single server, you can run out of resources pretty fast, in which case each CGI request will be queued, and this is probably what’s slowing the thing down. If that’s the case, you can’t do anything in the CGI itself to speed it up, because the CGI hasn’t even loaded yet. All you can do is re-configure the machine to handle more processes (primarily by increasing RAM), or move to a multi-server configuration, which the software may not support. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Ryan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7feea3/32.png) [@The\_Ryan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Ryan)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2000, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/51 "2000-05-05T05:11:47Z")
Gaudere: > [@](#): > > The people who have hit submit and _not_ had a post go through are very very rare, as far as I can tell. But if there _isn’t_ a doublepost, you don’t know that the poster pushed “submit” twice, now do you? So of course the only cases of people pushing “submit” twice are people that have doubleposts. I’m pretty sure that I’ve had posts disappear more ofdten than I’ve doubleposted. > [@](#): > > (People sometimes make tiny changes to each post when they multipost, too, but at least it would get the great majority.) You could check for a certain percentage not quite 100%. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2000, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000/52 "2000-05-07T13:22:48Z")
> [@](#): > > The people who have hit submit and _not_ had a post go through are very very rare, as far as I can tell. Hopefully that’s still so, but FWIW, it’s happened to me twice in the past few days. (It had never happened to me before, to teh best of my recollection.) The second time (on the MPSIMS “Satan’s Summer Shindig” thread), you can see a post where I wonder aloud whether to trust the CGI. (The post it referred to never appeared, so I wound up retyping it.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trust-the-cgi-post-only-once-please/18000.md?page=2)