Page hangs and submits twice

Question

I have page which has three on-submit processes. All of the processes call stored procedures. One of the process takes over 6 to 8 minutes and causes the page to hang and then times out, i.e. instead of showing the next page, I see "page cannot be displayed" message. Moreover, it seems that page has been submitted twice. The other strange thing is that stored procedures called by the page processes finish successfully even though the user do not go to the next page to see the results of the work accomplished by these store procedures.
I have tried this experiment with a simpler page with one submit button which invokes one long running process when pressed. It seems when page hangs it submits again. I can attest this as there is a row being inserted by the stored procedure called by the on-sumbit process. I see this row being submitted twice with a time span of approximately 5 minutes (there is column for create_date and create_user).
I have seen suggestions for using dbms_job for long running process, but this operation has to be done synchronously and user needs to see the results of the process on the next page. If the job is done asynchronously, then how can I refresh the hanging page and take the user to the result page.
TIA,
Salman

Answer 1

Salman,
There is an Apache timeout directive that you can increase, which should solve both problems. It looks like after the timeout the request is being retried, which may be the result of a different Apache directive. The access and error logs should show you some useful information about these cases. Some other reader might offer what those directives are, I'm not sure.
That you are seeing the page processes complete even though the HTTP request times out is not strange. Once the server-side code is invoked, the request timeout cannot stop it.
Scott