Content coming from a web application sometimes randomly shuffled
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21-04-2022 - |
Question
We develop a Java web application which is run on Tomcat. It's been installed on many computers and it's working without problems. Recently, on a single remote installation, it exhibits very strange behavior: Sometimes content coming through HTTP to the browser is randomly shuffled - wrong data being served for a given URL. Most often it manifests as images being randomly exchanged on a web page. But it's not limited to images, it happened to me that instead of a HTML page the browser got one of the images instead.
I tried to debug the problem using FireBug + NetExport, and so far I gathered:
- It appears randomly. Most of the time content is error-free, the problem occurs only from time to time.
- The same application runs on many installations, but only this single installation produces the error.
- It's not connected to a particular browser - we tried different browsers from different computers and the problem persists.
- It occurs when viewed from the server itself (localhost) too, which rules out some broken transparent proxy on the way.
- Both images and HTML pages are affected.
- If wrong content is received, the data itself is consistent:
Content-Length
,Content-Type
,ETags
, etc. - everything matches the content. Just that it's wrong data for a given URL.
I'm truly puzzled, I've never seen such an error. I'd be grateful for any ideas how to investigate the problem further.
No correct solution