Server weirdness

[justsomeguy]

This is the second time I've seen this happen, on two different servers running different applications in different environments, and it makes zero sense. Someone let me know if they've seen anything like this.Both of these applications were classic ASP applications. One of them was using VBScript, the other Javascript. The page would just stop loading at a certain point (the same point every time) and sit there with an hourglass. On the server I was looking at today, accessing the site via the localhost URL would work fine, but using the domain the page would hang. Just now, the page was hanging at this point:

	  <td valign="top">		<b>Repair Type</b><br>		<select name="repair" class="standard_input"><%  for (i = 0; i < REPAIR_TYPES.length; i++)  {	echo("		  <option value=\"" + REPAIR_TYPES[i].id + "\"");	if (repair == REPAIR_TYPES[i].id)	  echo(" selected");	echo(">");	for (j = 1; j < REPAIR_TYPES[i].level; j++)	  echo("   ");	echo(REPAIR_TYPES[i].label + "</option>\n");  }%>		</select>	  </td>

It would display "<b>Repair Typ" and just stop, with an hourglass. This was happening on multiple clients, btw, but not in localhost. So, I added this, actually right after the <b>Repair Type</b><br> line and before the select line:<!-- <%=REPAIR_TYPES.length%> types -->Adding that caused the page to work fine under all circumstances. Removing it once again caused the page to stop. In this case, REPAIR_TYPES is a static array. I believe that the page was in fact sending the rest of the "repair type" line, and the <select> line, but probably entered an infinite loop trying to deal with the REPAIR_TYPES array for some reason (it has 4 elements and is constant throughout the application).In the other case I have seen this happen, it was happening with a database recordset. In that case, a certain field in the database was always coming out as null or empty, when it was obvious that field was populated. If I printed the value of the field prior to the line that was causing the problem, all of a sudden the other line was able to get the right value from the field. Again, removing the print statement caused the same line to find a null in the previously-populated field.What the heck does printing, or maybe just accessing the variable, have to do with this stuff??? Why does the page behave differently if a variable was just accessed at some point without getting modified at all? Has anyone else seen anything like this? The first time I saw this happen, even though printing the value to solve the problem made absolutely zero sense to me, I chalked it up as a bug somewhere in the server. Now I'm seeing the same thing in a different environment. And before today, everything was working fine. It stopped about 3 hours ago. Maybe a server restart would solve the problem, but I can't confirm that at this time. Regardless, since the behavior is reproducible and always does the same thing, it points to something systematic.whiskey tango foxtrot?

[aspnetguy]

I have seen this before except with PHP5. It did this on phpMyAdmin and Wordpress yet IPB worked great.I never found a solution, I downgraded to PHP4 and the problem went away.