[wp-hackers] Bug in class-snoopy.php causes Dashboard script to unexpectedly halt

[Jeremy Visser]

I'm not sure exactly which is the right list to post in, so I thought I'd
post in both WP-Hackers and WP-Testers.

About a week ago, I was having some
trouble<http://narnia.bounceme.net/jeremy/2006/04/21/bad-snoopy/>with
my Dashboard only displaying half a page which I though was due to
having WP-SlimStat installed, as the problem only occurred when the plugin
was activated, but later found out it was probably because the extra memory
WP-SlimStat used helped push it past the tipping point.

I eventually discovered that this was actually due to a strangely set value
in class-snoopy.php. The $maxlength value, which was used in the
_httprequest() function, was set to 500000 bytes. Snoopy was passing this
value to fread() which only accepts up to 8192 bytes, which means that
having $maxlength set to 500000 bytes is completely pointless. Although in
most cases, fread will work fine, in my case it was causing problems with
the script suddenly terminating without a trace. Changing $maxlength to 8192
fixed the problem.

I also noticed that the Test
Track<http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/TestTrack/>was also
experiencing the same symptoms when I was logged on to it the other
day. This means that I am probably not alone in this strange behaviour.

I have filed a bug
report<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1474137&group_id=2091&atid=102091>on
snoopy.sf.net <http://sourceforge.net/projects/snoopy/> , but I doubt that
it will be fixed. I would like to see the next release of WordPress have
$maxlength set to 8192 out of the box, as I think this will fix some
problems with the class.

--
Jeremy Visser
Email: jeremy.visser at gmail.com
Website: http://jeremy.serveblog.net/