problems with many paged DCT's

System

We have a cgi callout in our DCT which initiates a perl module that generates the pages of the DCR to a preview server, and displays a list of links for all those pages, so that the user can simply click on the links to preview their content (we're serving JSP's on our website).

For some reason, when the DCR is set to generate more than about 26 pages, the cgi runs twice, causing the pages to be generated and deployed twice, and the time it takes to do this causes the browser to time out and display a 500 error. The error occurs just before the second loop finishes.

We have no idea why it runs twice. But it runs from start to finish two times, even after an exit statement was put at the end to be sure the cgi is terminated. This insures that there is not a loop inside the cgi that is running the generate modules a second time. Debugging statements were put into every 'loop' and 'if' statement all the way through, and it has been determined that the cgi definitely runs completely and without error two full times. The pages are created successfully (both times), and exist on the preview server after the cgi runs.

The problem is the timeout and resulting 500 error before the end of the second loop (which continues even though the browser has timed out), and the cause is the second running of the cgi. The cgi is called by a button in the DCT which calls the cgi wrapper.

The only possibility we can see is that the cgi wrapper has some kind of error handling which, if the connection is lost, tries to rerun the cgi. The following is the call to the wrapper (where the cgi is called).

<cgi-callout url='/iw-bin/iw_cgi_wrapper.cgi/ed_co_gen_to_prev.cgi' label='Preview'/>

Does anyone know if this could be the case, or has anyone had a similar issue? Any ideas on how to fix this? Any strategies for further debugging?

Thanks, M.austin