Item5814: Many <cite>, </cite> tags cause 'save' to spin

I have installed Twiki 4.2, and love the new WYSIWYG editor. I have on particular twiki topic that I was consistently editing, and it has a large table in it. At some point, when I was editing this topic, the WYSIWYG "Save" button would never return (appeared to hang). From the Solaris process table, I would see the twiki 'save' process eating up a whole CPU. It would never finish. I ran Solaris dtrace against it (15 seconds), to get 'save' call stacks, and saw...

           ...
         libc_psr.so.1`memcpy+0x1c
              libperl.so.1`Perl_pp_uc+0x2a8
              libperl.so.1`Perl_runops_standard+0x3c
              libperl.so.1`S_run_body+0x22c
              libperl.so.1`perl_run+0x338
              perl`main+0x94
              perl`_start+0x108
               37

              libperl.so.1`Perl_runops_standard+0x3c
              libperl.so.1`S_run_body+0x22c
              libperl.so.1`perl_run+0x338
              perl`main+0x94
              perl`_start+0x108
               74

              libperl.so.1`Perl_runops_standard+0x38
              libperl.so.1`S_run_body+0x22c
              libperl.so.1`perl_run+0x338
              perl`main+0x94
              perl`_start+0x108
              167

I was beating my head against the wall, trying to figure out what was causing it. I created another topic, as a copy of it, and starting raw editing it, trying to figure out what portion of the topic text was causing 'save' to go wacky. The last portion of the topic contained the following text, which looked odd...

  ...
top 32 bits is major device number

><cite><cite>...manymanymorecites 2dec 0b00100110<br /> 38</cite>manymanymorecites</cite>
><cite><cite>...manymanymorecites 2dec 0b100000<br /> 32</cite>manymanymorecites</cite>

Hmmm, where did all the <cite></cite> tags come from? I didn't put them there. After I removed them, 'save' worked fine. Even saving the original verbatim code, above, cause twiki.org's WYSIWYG Editor to hang, upon submitting this bug. Had to remove them, replacing with "manymanymorecites".

-- TWiki:Main/JimNissen - 25 Jul 2008

If you can reproduce this, then open the HTML viewer in TinyMCE before you save the topic. Are the cite tags there? Also, what additional plugins (beside the usual) do you have installed?

-- TWiki:Main.CrawfordCurrie - 25 Jul 2008

I have reproduced the problem, and yes the cite tags are there, as well. I don't have any additional plugins, from what comes installed with 4.2.

-- TWiki:Main.JimNissen - 06 Aug 2008

Jim had provided feedback but not flipped the state back to new. The work flow for our bug reports suck. People cannot know that they have to flip state back. We need to make this smarter.

-- KennethLavrsen - 25 Dec 2008

Since this is an edge case I think the priority is right at 'Normal'. Need to test more. confirmed.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 04 Jan 2009