large cookie errors on web server when indexer runs

[boxoffice]

Hi,
While running the indexer, I have been watching the error_log file on the web server using the command tail -f error_log

There seems to be very large cookies being passed back to the server, and this is producing errors.

Zoom's config > Authentication > cookie based authentication is set to 'use cookies from Windows and IE'

I don't need zoom to use cookies to get to all parts of the site, so I would be fine if zoom wasn't set to use cookies.

But the problem then is that when zoom indexes our vbulletin forum and is not using cookies, vbulletin adds extra querystrings to the page url to track the session, so our search results and sitemaps look ugly.

I know you guys use vbulletin so I thought you may have run into this issue.

Is there a way to not use cookie based authentication without the session querystring being added to my urls?

[Ray]

What sort of errors are you getting? Just having cookies being sent shouldn't cause errors.

There's no way to allow cookies on a portion of the site and not elsewhere.

[boxoffice]

The error is that the returned cookie size is too big for the server to handle, I think the max it can handle is 4kb. The web server software throws a 503 error and it then restarts.

We had this problem a while back with a certain browser, it had to do with the ad serving software that we're running. The software was adding characters to the cookie each page view. Eventually this was creating such a large cookie that the server stopped accepting it from the client and chucked 503 errors.

I don't know why this would occur when the zoom indexer spiders our site. I don't think there is a problem with zoom at all, its just our site.

I just thought if I turned off 'use cookies from Windows and IE' then zoom wouldn't use cookies and so this 503 error wouldn't occur.

But if I do that and zoom indexes vbulletin, it adds a session querystring to the urls in the index and sitemap.

I just thought there might be a way around that session querystring thing.

I don't need zoom to use cookies to access any part of my site, just to solve this vbulletin querystring issue.