text box truncating text in Flash Player (cache)

I'm going to lead with a recommendation that I think will solve it:

In the request that you're making for the logs, just append a GET parameter with a random value to the URL.  It's quick and dirty, but it's very effective, particularly on older clients that might have weird caching behaviors (or not correctly support more elegant server-side headers).  The trick is just to make sure that the GET parameter is unique for each request, such that nothing in the pipeline can cache it.

example: http://domain.com/showLogs.php?entropy=98712471309135097239

I can see why the scenario you're describing might get you right outcome, but I think it's happening for different reasons.  In general, the browser mediates network requests and would generally make the decision about whether to fetch an item from the network or the browser cache. I suspect that exiting the browser is really solving a caching problem within the browser itself.  Furthermore, refreshing the page would cause that Flash process to exit, and a new one would be spawned at launch.  I assume that you would have mentioned it if refreshing worked, so since it persists across multiple Flash Player invocations, it's more likely that it's a state that persists in the host environment.

I have some questions that would better inform the thesis behind my recommendation, but I don't think they're worth your time to answer unless you're still stuck after trying the entropy thing.

The ideal next step would be to just share a reduced example that we can run under a C++ debugger.  If it's really a Flash Player bug, looking at what the player is doing at runtime is far more informative than looking at ActionScript,  I suspect that if this *is* our bug, it's probably something weird that only happens under memory pressure (which is why it shows up after lots of appends to really large textfield bodies).

That said, here are the things I'd really like to know:

• Is this specific to a single browser or browser/os combination?
• Is this a Flex application, or just plain old ActionScript?  AS2 or AS3?
• In your browser's network tab, what do the contents of the responses look like once the application starts misbehaving?  Are they complete as expected?