25 November 2020, 7:37

Hi!

Our problem:

One student has a page that no browser can display without waiting at least 30 seconds or more -  a minute or so!

It is page with many entries ( approx 180) and many of them has attached pdf:s.  The pdf: are small though, 1-3 MB in size. And in my understanding they are on the page only links.

The same users have other pages that all load lightning fast. Only this user and this page has a problem   Is there a log in apache, mysql or in Mahara somewere that would explain what is going wrong?

I looked in error.log in apache2 but found nothing in that.

Or is it an unfortunate journal name? A forbidden character or so?

Any advice would help!!

Database size 2.8GB
Disk usage 22GB
Mahara version 19.10.3

Best Regards, NIklas

25 November 2020, 9:29

Hi Niklas,

From what you've said the first thing I'd check is the network speed of all the components loading for the page.

In either Firefox or Chrome I'd press F12 key and go to the network tab and then load the page that is slow.

I'd look for any files / scripts that were taking a long time to complete.

The problem maybe that something on the page is wanting to contact an external site and fails. 30 seconds is the usual timeout  for that. So page only finishes loading after that timeout.

Cheers

Robert

25 November 2020, 20:58

Hi Robert and thank you! It gave insight!

2.3 minutes caused by tinymce:s "theme silver" (?)  and maybe tinymce itself  - or in combo? See attachment,

Any tip of what to do next, appreciated! 

Best Regards, Niklas

28 November 2020, 18:52

Hi Niklas,

I'd wager it is the many PDFs that are embedded. They will all need to be loaded and that is taking time. While your PDFs may be small and thus don't fall into the category of large PDFs are browser intensive, it's still a lot that will need to be loaded.

Could you change the page and remove a number of PDFs and see if that improves the loading time to determine whether it is the PDFs or something different?

Best,

Kristina

01 December 2020, 20:34

God morning! Thanks for the tip.

I did that. Earlier i randomly took away entries on the page and after a while it got quicker but never acceptabel. This time I took away all blocks with entries with pdf:s.

Some 50 of them ..But I could not delete only files. needed to delete the block with text entry holding the pdf(s).

And it helped..but all gone still not good enough,,,So more tests coming up.  Still suspicious about tinymce and theme silver.  I will get back!

And many entries should be able to have attachments, right?  But You wrote loaded pdf. Why a page that loads the pdfs? Seems strange way - why not only the link?

Best Regards, Niklas

04 December 2020, 21:31

Hi! Background again: So we upgraded to a new Mahara version - ended up on 19.10.3 

The slow problem page with some 160 page-blocks with 160 entries worked lightning fast in the older Mahara version.

And in even in  the 19.10.3  version an older page with 95% of the same entries and pdf links is still lightning fast! The rendered page is a view.php-page.  URL https://mahara.../view/view.php?id=11xxx

But since that lightning fast page was made in the older version of Mahara  (18.04)- if I would like to edit it now- Mahara forces me to convert it to the new page layout with this text:

"As part of Mahara 19.10 we introduced a new way to create a page layout. To be able to edit this page, you will need to convert the old to the new layout. If you want to convert only this page, click 'Accept'. To convert all pages and not see this message again, click 'Accept and remember'. This option can be changed in your Preferences. To go back to the page without editing it, click 'Cancel'."

I do not want that page turn slow. 

if I instead make a copy of that fast page and then convert the copy in order to be able to edit it  - it gets the same slow loading problem as on all new Mahara 19.10.3 pages  with several entries ( 20+).

It takes  3-30 minutes or even forever to load.

As said before theme.js seems to be involved according to F12 read outs . Now I add - it might be a bug in the code for the new page layout in Mahara 19.10 and forward that is the culprit.

My solution for now is to divide "the slow page" in 12 new pages and then put them in a neat collection.  But I can't do that for every phd-students slow page...only for one - due to to reviews coming up next week.

So still a major problem for us, hopefully You will find a explanation/solution.

Best Regards, Niklas

06 December 2020, 18:47

Hi Niklas,

I assumed you used the PDF block to add the PDFs to your page, but you are saying you use the text block. So it could be the layout. Gridstack is calculating the height and width of blocks, and I suspect that this could take a while with that many blocks on a page. Can you please send me an export of the page?

Thank you

Kristina

23 September 2021, 7:53

Hi again!  "Slow page-rendering"- bug still hits us. 

Recap of the bug description:  Mahara 19.10.3 can't handle many (aka 20+) entries in a page without getting extremely slow (we are talking about minutes and in some cases not at all) .

So we are still suffering from the bug.   

Last time I think we concluded that new gridstack code have some cumbersome way off resizing some page items. And that would be the cause. Change came about upgrade 18.xx to 19.10.3?  The funny thing was -  exactly the same pages worked very lightning fast and fine in 18.xx but not at all in 19.10.3. Hence the Gridstack theory.

Only those pages with 20 + more entries get problems. Well more or less. This problem is becoming a deal breaker to use Mahara. Even if only some percentage gets in trouble - they abandon Mahara for other solutions.

We need to remedy that.  Are we that fortunate that...that bug "disappeared" in some newer version or is that still status quo?

Best regards, Niklas

27 September 2021, 9:01

Hi Niklas,

We have made changes to Gridstack since 19.10. It would be great if you could try a supported version of Mahara on a test server and checked what is going on. 160 or more blocks is a lot though to render and depending on the content there can be any number of things going wrong, including the earlier mentioned PDFs. I don't remember having asked you for an export. If you could make one, I can try to install it locally and check.

Thanks

Kristina