[Catalyst] Troubleshooting Help Please

[Paul Cory]

All,

I've Googled repeatedly, and RTFMed, and I've reached a point where I  
have to ask for help.

I have a Catalyst Web App that requires users to log in before they  
can do anything (it's a front end for managing mailing list  
subscriptions).

This runs on Apache 1.3/mod_perl 1/perl 5.8.8/MySQL 5.0 on SLES 10.  
Apache, perl and mod_perl are compiled from source, not the  
distribution versions.

The problem is that as the day progresses, and the application sees  
more and more use, login behavior becomes inconsistent.

It starts out working flawlessly. Then, after a while, valid logins  
start to occasionally fail. Trying again gets you in - at the start.  
As time passes, the problem gets progressively worse and it eventually  
gets to the point where people quit trying because the success rate  
for logging in drops to 10% or less.

By fail, I mean you go to the log in screen, put in a valid username  
and password combination, and then get seamlessly redirected to the  
log in screen, as if you had just arrived fresh to the app.

Restarting Apache solves the problem, at least for a while. And then  
things begin to degrade again...

I've verified that the problem is not end user error. Once you get it  
to recognize your login, the system work fine.

Other Web Apps I've written, using HTML::Mason and running on this  
exact same server under mod_perl do not exhibit this behavior.

I've checked the Apache error log, and I can't find any related errors.

I'm using the following plug-in for authentication:

	 Authentication
                  Session
  			Session::Store::FastMmap
  			Session::State::Cookie


The problem did not appear in testing, only in production.

Any ideas on where to look, or what to try?

FWIW, here's the login controller code (no promises on it being great  
- programming is something I've learned in self-defense). The  
controller handles log ins for both the regular and admin side of the  
application. First it checks the regular users realm, and, if that  
fails,  then the admin users realm (two separate databases) .



package esubscription::Controller::Login;

use strict;
use warnings;
use base 'Catalyst::Controller';



sub index : Private {
     my ( $self, $c ) = @_;

         # Get the username and password from form
         my $login = $c->request->params->{login} || "";
         my $password = $c->request->params->{password} || "";

         # If the username and password values were found in form
         if ($login && $password) {
             # Attempt to log the user in
             if ( $c->authenticate({login => $login, password =>  
$password}) ) {
                 # If successful, then let them use the application
                 $c->response->redirect($c->uri_for('/'));
                 return;
             } else {

             	if (  $c->authenticate({login => $login, password =>  
$password}, 'admin') ) {
					$c->response->redirect($c->uri_for('/admin/'));
					return;

               	}
               	
               	else { # Set an error message

                	 $c->stash->{message} = "Bad username or password.";
                	 $c->stash->{login} = "$login";
                 }
             }
         }

         # If either of above don't work out, send to the login page
         $c->stash->{template} = 'templates/forms/login_form.mas';
}



1;



Also, there's this snippet in the root controller that handles  
checking for valid user:

	# If a user doesn't exist, force login
	
	if (!$c->user_exists) {
	
		$c->response->redirect($c->uri_for('login'));
		# Return 0 to cancel 'post-auto' processing and prevent use of  
application
		return 0;
	}



Thanks for the help!


Paul Cory
WCPSS Webmaster
pcory at wcpss.net