Weird - Service Pack 2, IIS, & 304 Errors

OK - This is a little weird.

We have two farms, each consisting of two Windows 2003 web servers.
One server in each farm received Service Pack 2 the other day during a
memory upgrade. When the servers came back online, we started getting
304 responses for about 1/2 of the requests. The majority of the 304
responses were for .asp files. So, I uninstalled SP2 for those two
machines, thinking it should resolve the issue. Wrong. I am still
getting 304 errors. The only thing that has changed is that SP2 was
installed, with a couple of other updates. I have since uninstalled
everything that was installed. The RAM was taken out, etc.

Any ideas? About 50% of requests to each server now result in a 304!

Please Help.

Re: Weird - Service Pack 2, IIS, & 304 Errors

Can you clarify why HTTP status code of 304 is something that you
should be concerned about? What status code are you expecting and why?

For example:
1. If you send a POST request with expect: , you can get a 100
continue response, and that is OK.
2. If you send a conditional GET request, you can get a 304 not
modified response, and that is OK
3. If you require Basic authentication, you can get a 401 access
denied response, and that is OK

And as counterpoint, not all 200 are OK. For example, if the resource
is supposed to require authentication but just returns 200 OK with the
resource, obviously something is broken. If the resource is supposed
to be updated but it returns 304, then something is also broken.

Thus, it is necessary for you to clearly detail why you are concerned
because otherwise, I do not see anything wrong. Depending on
configuration, 50% 304s could be a good thing.


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//





On Jul 16, 4:24 pm, TampaWebDevelopm...@gmail.com wrote:
> OK - This is a little weird.
>
> We have two farms, each consisting of two Windows 2003 web servers.
> One server in each farm received Service Pack 2 the other day during a
> memory upgrade. When the servers came back online, we started getting
> 304 responses for about 1/2 of the requests. The majority of the 304
> responses were for .asp files. So, I uninstalled SP2 for those two
> machines, thinking it should resolve the issue. Wrong. I am still
> getting 304 errors. The only thing that has changed is that SP2 was
> installed, with a couple of other updates. I have since uninstalled
> everything that was installed. The RAM was taken out, etc.
>
> Any ideas? About 50% of requests to each server now result in a 304!
>
> Please Help.

Re: Weird - Service Pack 2, IIS, & 304 Errors

On Jul 16, 11:22 pm, David Wang wrote:
> Can you clarify why HTTP status code of 304 is something that you
> should be concerned about? What status code are you expecting and why?
>
> For example:
> 1. If you send a POST request with expect: , you can get a 100
> continue response, and that is OK.
> 2. If you send a conditional GET request, you can get a 304 not
> modified response, and that is OK
> 3. If you require Basic authentication, you can get a 401 access
> denied response, and that is OK
>
> And as counterpoint, not all 200 are OK. For example, if the resource
> is supposed to require authentication but just returns 200 OK with the
> resource, obviously something is broken. If the resource is supposed
> to be updated but it returns 304, then something is also broken.
>
> Thus, it is necessary for you to clearly detail why you are concerned
> because otherwise, I do not see anything wrong. Depending on
> configuration, 50% 304s could be a good thing.
>
> //Davidhttp://w3-4u.blogspot.comhttp://blogs.msdn.com/David. Wang
> //
>
> On Jul 16, 4:24 pm, TampaWebDevelopm...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>
> > OK - This is a little weird.
>
> > We have two farms, each consisting of two Windows 2003 web servers.
> > One server in each farm received Service Pack 2 the other day during a
> > memory upgrade. When the servers came back online, we started getting
> > 304 responses for about 1/2 of the requests. The majority of the 304
> > responses were for .asp files. So, I uninstalled SP2 for those two
> > machines, thinking it should resolve the issue. Wrong. I am still
> > getting 304 errors. The only thing that has changed is that SP2 was
> > installed, with a couple of other updates. I have since uninstalled
> > everything that was installed. The RAM was taken out, etc.
>
> > Any ideas? About 50% of requests to each server now result in a 304!
>
> > Please Help.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

I would expect a 200 response code, not a 304. There is no reason for
IIS to tell the users' browsers to load the *.asp files from cache.
This started with SP2.

Re: Weird - Service Pack 2, IIS, & 304 Errors

On Jul 21, 2:01 pm, TampaWebDevelopm...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Jul 16, 11:22 pm, David Wang wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Can you clarify why HTTP status code of 304 is something that you
> > should be concerned about? What status code are you expecting and why?
>
> > For example:
> > 1. If you send a POST request with expect: , you can get a 100
> > continue response, and that is OK.
> > 2. If you send a conditional GET request, you can get a 304 not
> > modified response, and that is OK
> > 3. If you require Basic authentication, you can get a 401 access
> > denied response, and that is OK
>
> > And as counterpoint, not all 200 are OK. For example, if the resource
> > is supposed to require authentication but just returns 200 OK with the
> > resource, obviously something is broken. If the resource is supposed
> > to be updated but it returns 304, then something is also broken.
>
> > Thus, it is necessary for you to clearly detail why you are concerned
> > because otherwise, I do not see anything wrong. Depending on
> > configuration, 50% 304s could be a good thing.
>
> > //Davidhttp://w3-4u.blogspot.comhttp://blogs.msdn.com/David. Wang
> > //
>
> > On Jul 16, 4:24 pm, TampaWebDevelopm...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > > OK - This is a little weird.
>
> > > We have two farms, each consisting of two Windows 2003 web servers.
> > > One server in each farm received Service Pack 2 the other day during a
> > > memory upgrade. When the servers came back online, we started getting
> > > 304 responses for about 1/2 of the requests. The majority of the 304
> > > responses were for .asp files. So, I uninstalled SP2 for those two
> > > machines, thinking it should resolve the issue. Wrong. I am still
> > > getting 304 errors. The only thing that has changed is that SP2 was
> > > installed, with a couple of other updates. I have since uninstalled
> > > everything that was installed. The RAM was taken out, etc.
>
> > > Any ideas? About 50% of requests to each server now result in a 304!
>
> > > Please Help.- Hide quoted text -
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> I would expect a 200 response code, not a 304. There is no reason for
> IIS to tell the users' browsers to load the *.asp files from cache.
> This started with SP2.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -




Umm... you may want to rethink your expectations

If the browser sends a conditional request, then IIS needs to send
back a response like 304.

Thus, if you think that 304s are incorrect, then you first need to
prove that an HTTP client like a web browser is NOT making a
conditional request, yet a conditional response came back.

Otherwise, there is really nothing wrong with IIS/ASP behavior. It may
not be what you want, but you have to look elsewhere for the cause.

I'm guessing that you do not expect any client-side caching of the ASP-
generated HTTP content, in which case you need to start looking at the
HTTP response generated by the ASP page with a tool like WFetch from
the IIS6 Resource Toolkit. Maybe ETags or Cache-Control headers are
being mangled on ASP-generated responses by network devices in front
of the web farm servers, etc. I would not get too fascinated on the
304 response code; it is just indicative of something else that is
awry.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=56F C92EE-A71A-4C73-B628-ADE629C89499&displaylang=en


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//