21 February 2022, 22:35

A few of our students have reported their portfolio pages opening slowly (frequently taking several minutes to complete loading, with "page not responding - continue?" warnings from the browser). When loaded, the page contains very large  amounts of whitespace.

Browser tools show that the height of the block has been set far larger than required - the selected block contains text -  three fairly short paragraphs (around 600px), but the height has been set to over 21,000px. I've checked the HTML content of the block in the database, and can't see any additionaly line breaks or similar.

Has anyone seen this before? And can anyone make any suggestions?

Thanks,
Rob Hardy
York St John University

08 March 2022, 19:06

Hi Rob,

In general, this issue may be related to the known issue for Gridstack, though we haven't seen the numbers as seen in your screenshot at all.

A few questions to get some context of your issue:

• What version of Mahara do you have? Please only mention the major version, e.g. 21.04 or 21.10 in case you are not at the latest minor point release, which we encourage you to be on.
• You say that some students experience this issue. What is different about their pages from other pages? Do they use more external content? Embed files? Use special formatting? ...
• Is the huge white space confined to a particular block type or a particular media type? Can you share an export of the page? If not, what if you export that page and import it on our demo site?
• Could you replicate this problem with similar content on our demo site?
• Do other pages load slowly as well or only those that have excessive white space?
• Does the problem go away when you edit the page?
• Is the excessive spacing also appearing in the ‘block_instance_dimension’ table?
• Does the problem occur only on pages that existed for a long time or also newly created ones? If it is on older pages, from which version did you upgrade to your current version of Mahara?
• Do only pages with excessive white space load slowly or is that a general issue?

Kind regards,

Doris