Pages do not finish loading

Oh, I was wondering why the usage tracking showed some Wii users ...

Anyway, that's kinda odd. May have to try the browser on my Wii to see what it does. Do you type URL's using the wand? Must be weird. Okay I'll try to be serious. FWIW I'm probably going to a government hearing tomorrow about offshore oil drilling and will be away all day.

Questions:

1- Any idea when this started? (need to know so I can track down the potential cause)

2- Does the page content show up and the browser simply continues indicating it is still loading? Or does the page not show up?

1. At about 9:30 PM PDT I upgraded the site to the latest point release of Drupal. That may have changed something. On the other hand what's likely the original culprit is that there are 3 or so javascript files loaded at the end of the page. If the server from which those files is coming doesn't respond right away the browser could still be showing it's waiting for something to load, hence that's the behavior you reported. At least one of those javascript files is coming from a 3rd party server and the performance of that server is out of my control.

2. Hurm.. I'll look at widening out the text. I like the dashed effect because it's less harsh than the solid underline. However it's implemented by setting a border and obviously a border is going to touch the line below like you say, I hadn't thought of that. Some padding might help. Or else I'll revert back.

The file in question is part of the Google Analytics service I use to track usage and traffic on the site. It tells me a zillion useful snippets about the traffic. This kind of tracking is an absolute requirement in managing sites on the Internet. It doesn't add user-visible featureitis but it's something I rely on.

There is an option in the supporting module to cache the javascript file locally, so I just turned on that option. It may make a difference, let's see.

I have explained before what they do and the scripts are important or they wouldn't be here. I have explained that I don't see this behavior on any of the browsers available to me, and that does include Windoze with IE7. Another person described it as "100% CPU use" and I asked for more data and did not get an answer.

Clearly something is going on for you, which I don't know how to replicate which makes it hard to know what to fix. It's either a file taking a long time to load or else "100% CPU use", depending on who is reporting it, and it's not clear which it is.

If I recall right -- are you using IE6? I noticed there is a bit of code that runs only on IE6 which might be extra time involvement. Further IE6 is way beyond end of life and should be replaced with newer versions of IE or preferably Firefox.

i have the same problem, a piece of script crashes and locks up.
this happens with the newest versions of firefox.
eventual i get an error message indicating which part caused the lock up and whether i want to halt excecution.
after halting excecution, the page works normally.

next time i get the error, ill make note what it actually says.

Matt

There are multiple scripts in action, not just the usage statistics one. For example the google ads are also implemented with javascript. The IE6 only script I mentioned does some kind of fixup for PNG files, and runs after the page loads.

There are three scripts loaded, two at the beginning of the page, the third at the end. All are loaded off my server. Originally the google analytics script had been loaded from googles servers but I changed that setting a month or so ago. Once loaded the scripts do some execution of bits and pieces.

For example the popup menu at the top of the script is partly driven with javascript. There are different bits and pieces of javascript serving different purposes at different bits of the pages.

I wanted to know about CPU load because it's possible the script execution is the problem, rather than loading the scripts from the server.

For example I often notice in the firefox statusbar that a request is going to google analytics' server. The script isn't being loaded from their server so obviously that's the script execution sending data to the server.

BTW for an experiment I just turned off the google ad which has been just above the menu. I'd been thinking to do so anyway because it has a very low click rate indicating it's not terribly popular. It means that each page view will do one less request to google's servers.

BTW I'm noticing at the moment on my browser & system, that the statusbar indicator is showing the page still loading for a longish time. However the page is usable even while loading. Maybe that's why I hadn't noticed.

I use a monitoring service (mon.itor.us) for a while and it shows the page load time on this site is pretty darn variable. "Page load time" is a little different than "pages do not finish loading" but it's close. In any case the current statistics are Uptime 100%, Avg=3926ms, Min=95ms, Max=9703ms.

That's a bad average page load time. Because of that and a couple other reasons I'm thinking to switch servers again.

And while I'm thinking about this... it's not like my browser is 100% snappy all the time. In fact it's generally slow overall. I like to keep a bunch of browser tabs open like three different gmail windows open, all my web sites, web pages I want to read but haven't yet, etc.

It seems this effects the browser performance. For example some sites (like zoomilife.com) make the browser slow. Zoomilife.com has a lot of javascript widgets blinking away all the time. It would make sense that having a lot of open tabs (50 or more is common for me) makes the memory footprint of the browser bigger.

I routinely see the browser make odd pauses before it responds. For example typing this I'm noticing usually the letters show right up, and sometimes there's a pause for 10 seconds or so before they appear. Other times dragging a scrollbar takes awhile for the scrollbar to respond.

An idea which might help with page load time is to simplify the menubar, discuss here: http://visforvoltage.org/forum/6838-possible-simplification-menu-bar

Tried the same.. 5-10 seconds per page load, a couple were longer on the order of 10-15 secs.

I'm on a 1.5mbps DSL.

Waiting for the progress bar to finish. Further the page is often somewhat usable before the progress bar finishes.

Have you tried firefox?

Q: How was the site behaving today? I was busy with other stuff today and didn't spend a lot of time on V. However on the night of the 22nd I turned on a caching module that's supposed to improve performance. According to the monitoring service the page load times were less bad than before. Unfortunately the YSlow tool hasn't been upgraded for firefox 3.5 or I'd be able to do real timing measurements.

Gary, I also masqueraded as you and made a posting - it didn't take 30 seconds to save, it took the same short blip of a couple seconds as it does when I'm me.

Yes the icons are all local and are individual files. If I had YSlow available I could see whether they're being cached in the browser or not. The problem with them being individual files is well known, that browsers can only download two files at a time, there are 13 icons in the edit toolbar, meaning 7 sets of downloads, and time is ticking away with every set.

The caching I turned on was on the server side relating to whether it regenerates content or simply retrieves it from the cache.

YShow is the tool I know to see what the browser cache is doing or not doing.

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but the site won't let me start a new forum topic, and at the top of every page is a list of error messages. I haven't switched browsers (Firefox) so something is wrong with the site. Here is what is at the top of this page (it's often much, much longer):

Warning: trim() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in kudos_form() (line 591 of /home/robogeek5/visforvoltage.org/sites/all/modules/kudos/kudos.module).

In the past few days I keep getting this. On my iPad, iPhone and now on my iMac. Any iDea (pun) what it is?

I also get this list of error messages on top of some pages (including this one). So far as I can tell, everything is loading OK and complete. Have seen no problem as a result of the error messages or along with the error messages. I use Firefox.

A couple days ago I upgraded the site to latest revisions of the software.

Apparently some local changes I'd made to the Kudo's module have been overwritten. In the meantime I have disabled the Kudo's module.

The other issue with being unable to post a message - I have found the cause, and we can now post new messages again.