The application that I am having trouble with is a generic web application… nothing special about the way it handles users. That is to say, I handle user information in the session variable, with the session managed via a cookie.
A client of mine is having an issue whereby the users are logged in and every now and again they are presented with a page for a different user (this is easy to determine because the user’s name is at the top of each page). If they click the ‘Home’ link, everything is fine again, apparently.
Now as far as my PHP knowledge is concerned, it would take some effort to mix this kind of thing up, right? I can’t replicate the issue in any of our development environments and as far as I am concerned, like I say, it would take some effort to actually ‘share’ this kind of session information…
So my question is this: what could be the possible problems? Every time I experienced this before it was due to a ‘mis-behaving’ proxy server, though they are telling me that they are not proxying the requests.
Is there anything else that I may be missing? Any other possible reasons for this (naturally this could include an issue with my code)?
Thanks…
So it turns out that the final outcome of this situation, at least, was fairly oddball.
It turns out that the client was using handheld computers to access the application and letting the batteries go flat. This particular device then reset its clock to 2005 when the battery was eventually recharged and it seems as though this led the browser to read certain pages from its cache.
As soon as the clock on the device/s was set correctly, the issue went away.
Thanks to all for the suggestions: I hate trying to debug these caching type issues. I guess, though, that I really should add some headers to try and stop these handhelds caching the data.