19 October 2013, 1:26

Hi Community,

i hope you can help me. My page is loading the images of the drag and drop section when editing a page very slow. also the thumbnails of the file browser takes a while before I can continue work.

The page itself is loading good and fast, but the images of buttons and thumbnails not. I tested some stuff with firebug and it shows, that e.g.

***********/thumb.php?type=blocktype&bt=image&ap=file

***********/thumb.php?type=blocktype&bt=internalmedia&ap=file

***********/thumb.php?type=blocktype&bt=filedownload&ap=file

are taking the most time.

once all images/thumbnails loaded, it works fine..... (it get cached) but new session, new loading...

any idea ?

21 October 2013, 15:22

Hello John,

What version of Mahara are you using and do you run a MySQL or PostgreSQL database?

Cheers

Kristina

23 October 2013, 0:39

Hi Kristina,

cause John is working for me, i answer ypur question:

it´s version 1.7.2 on MySQL (on VMWare) with SSL.

kind regards

Klaus

24 October 2013, 23:05

Hello Klaus,

Thank you very much. Now over to a developer who may know what's going on. I just posted the initial question that might help them look into the general direction.

Cheers

Kristina

25 October 2013, 12:40

Hi Klaus,

Pretty much all that thumb.php does is check the user's permission to view the artefact, and then read the contents of the image file out of the $cfg->dataroot directory and send them back in a HTTP request.

Is your $cfg->dataroot directory perhaps on a different partition that is somewhat slow (like NFS or Amazon S3)? Or, have you got some kind of buffering scheme in place that might be preventing thumb.php from returning any data until the whole file has been printed?

Cheers,

Aaron

26 October 2013, 6:00

Hey everyone,

I think your solution is related to the sessions.safe._path in the auth/sessions.php file. We changed that to a local directory on each application server instead of the maharadata folder (dataroot). This fixed the problem immediately for us.
Our mahara data folder is an NFS mount that sits on NetApp storage.

Happy Halloween,

Rocky View Schools

26 October 2013, 6:37

This bug may be related? https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/785469

31 October 2013, 15:58

On the other hand, I would suspect that if sessions are the problem, then every page would be loading slowly, not just the thumbnails.

By the way, I've updated that bug with the latest code for the memcache patch, which we've been using here at Catalyst for the past couple of months. We use NFS for our dataroot directories (in order to share them between load-balanced web servers), and switching our sessions to memcache gave us a very noticeable improvement in page load times.

Cheers,

Aaron

02 November 2013, 4:13

Thank you all for the fast replies.

Klaus and I will try to test some of the mentioned solutions this week. We will report to you soon :)