Moodle in English: The internet can't keep up with me

The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Thursday, 19 April 2012, 2:59 AM

I have noticed this on an increasing basis this last week or so - maybe because I am on holiday and using my laptop and the internet more(if that's possible) but I keep getting this annoying experience of typing away and then ... my laptop will stop for a second.. and then catch up with me. It seems like it freezes - I get impatient and type in my letters two or three times only to have them appear then two or three times when my laptop comes back to life again. Is this an internet connection problem or a problem with my laptop? Actually, I notice this at school too when I am typing a document directly into Googledocs. It can't type as fast as I can and I am having to wait a few seconds for my letters to appear - as if there is a delay in the internet.

I would just like to check that it isn't my laptop about to die

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Thursday, 19 April 2012, 3:24 AM

Mary C.

That could well be. Only a couple of day ago the cable TV providers shifted their medium to the Internet. It is just a matter of time till the congestion catches up.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Friday, 20 April 2012, 3:37 PM

Hi Mary

Of course my previous comment was a half joke. There are experiments to stream cable TV also through the Internet but their success is yet to be proven. The outcome may or may not be a laughing matter!

Coming back to your observation, since you mention holidays I still think it is a network problem. Depending on where you are, the speed could be anything. Are you on mobile internet or your laptop goes online through the network of an internet-cafe? There are various browser based tools which measures your connection speed to the Internet. I don't use any because there is a small tool conky (search the web for related images) on my desktop displaying the network speed amoung many other thing. May be others can point more suitable tools.

If, as discussed in the other subthread, it is Windows 7 torturing your machine, you should sue Microsoft for damages.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Saturday, 21 April 2012, 3:28 AM

Hi guys - just to keep you informed - I am wondering if it is a Firefox 11 problem as when I googled Firefox not responding (which is what it keeps doing every few minutes or so) I saw lots of people with the same problem. I am going to use Chrome for a day and see if Chrome can keep up with me -in which case, that will explain it.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Derek Chirnside - Saturday, 21 April 2012, 4:12 AM

Mary

This is your holiday??

-Derek

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Saturday, 21 April 2012, 4:23 AM

Yes I am Moodling as my hobby in my holiday -when I go back to school on Monday I won't be able to Moodle as much because I have other jobs to do too!

And ...

I have been on Chrome for nearly an hour and a half and not ONCE has my laptop crashed, not responded or the typing lagged behind me. It must be Firefox

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by ben reynolds - Saturday, 21 April 2012, 4:29 AM

OK, then I'd be wondering if it's an extension you've got on FF.

Sorry to read your holiday is over.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Matt Bury - Saturday, 21 April 2012, 8:06 AM

Hi Mary,

Having read your description of the problem, my immediate thoughts were in the area of Javascript and I'm guessing that you're using Moodle 2. Is that right?

If Google Chrome doesn't freeze and Firefox does, Chrome's V8 Javascript engine is famously the fastest one out there, you could try a test to see what's tripping up your browser: http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com/ (It takes 5 minutes!) Moodle 2.x ain't GMail and it's various JS scripts are far from integrated and optimised. It may not just be a performance issue: perhaps some JS is unnecessarily buggy/slow? This should be reported to the Moodle.org tracker.

The chances are that if it's happening on your computer, it's probably happening on other people's too. That's a serious usability issue for learners who are trying to collaborate and learn online.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Saturday, 21 April 2012, 5:12 PM

Well what a LOVELY test I sat here for five minutes pleasantly watching all the animations, and the river, and thinking this should be one of those relaxing meditation videos they have on youtube!! My Firefox 11 scored 919 points - I kept the results but they don't mean anything to me except that it seemed to do pretty well on them. I will try Ben's suggestion of checking the add ons too - but at the moment I am just enjoying typing as fast as I possibly can with Chrome happily matching my speed

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by April Hannaford - Thursday, 26 April 2012, 1:17 PM

Mary,

Google Chrome is way faster. I used to use just firefox until it started taking forever for pages to load to create my courses. So I tried google chrome and have been using it ever since. Also, the more apps you use with these browsers the more chance you have at having hangups.

Google Chrome scored 2374 points with 7/7 Html5 capabilities

Internet Explorer scored 1255 points with 3/7 Html5 capabilities

Firefox scored 480 points with 6/7 Html5 capabilities

So I guess that means the Google Chrome works better than the others.. What do any of you think?

April

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Derek Chirnside - Thursday, 26 April 2012, 3:47 PM

I think it shows you can prove anything with statistics. IE more points than FF?

-Derek

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by ben reynolds - Thursday, 26 April 2012, 9:57 PM

I saw stuff about the speed of IE 9 last month, and yes, the 32-bit IE is faster than the 64-bit version.

I use FF and Chrome, but, because we are on Moodle 1.9, Chrome doesn't work for quick editing (no html editor), so FF is my main browser.

OTOH, FF has a problem with my uni's portal's redirects. It takes the redirects as endless loops. IE and Chrome don't have that problem.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Thursday, 26 April 2012, 10:03 PM

Well since I discovered Chrome could keep up with me quite happily, I have abandoned FF and don't miss its hanging one bit. The annoyance for me to as with Ben is that in school we are still on 1.9 and I forget until I am inside our Moodle and realise I don't have the hmtl editor. On the other hand, while Chrome is great at home, the network manager's settings for us in school mean that we can't save any favourites or sign into Chrome so every time I use it in school I have to manually find all my sites again.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Richard Oelmann - Thursday, 26 April 2012, 11:41 PM

So far I've stuck with FF as its been enough trouble getting people to use that instead of IE, but Chrome is looking good right now - but then I'm working on 2.x at the moment so I don't need to worry too much about the html editor not working

I know its not quite the same Mary, but I'm often moving from computer to computer and one solution to the bookmarks thing that I've done is that the links I use every single day I've created a little block on the sidebar of my moodle page and just create little hyperlinks in there - not ideal, but when I find myself in a different training room or IT suite, or using someone else's computer for training them/troubleshooting, then I know I can get at my main links regardless of browser/importing settings or doing anything other than accessing the mymoodle page (and as I'm normally on moodle to do the training/support anyway, that's no hardship ). Not particularly practical for my full list of bookmarks but for the 8-12 'biggies' it works well.

I'm sure there are other (better) solutions, but that one works for me

Did you ever come to a conclusion whether the original issue was FF or the internet speed while you were away - or given that you found Chrome better/faster have you not gone back to FF to try?

Richard

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by April Hannaford - Friday, 27 April 2012, 5:39 AM

I use chrome and the html editor works. Why does it work for some and not for others?

April

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by ben reynolds - Friday, 27 April 2012, 10:25 PM

Because Mary and I are stuck in 1.9. 2+ gives chrome the html editor.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Saturday, 28 April 2012, 3:21 PM

Hi Ben

Is it that bad?

Now we are on an Alice trip, here's an episode with the caterpillar:

`Are you content now?' said the Caterpillar.

`Well, I should like to be a LITTLE larger, sir, if you wouldn't mind,' said Alice: `three inches is such a wretched height to be.'

`It is a very good height indeed!' said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).

`But I'm not used to it!' pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought of herself, `I wish the creatures wouldn't be so easily offended!'

`You'll get used to it in time,' said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/chapter-05.html

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Saturday, 28 April 2012, 3:33 PM

Hi Mary

I'm interested too in what the original issue was. Did the "higher speed" in the Chromium browser solve your problem?

The Futuremark's Peacemaker is heavily JavaScript bound. Since Moodle moves more and more towards JS, the difference could explain the difference. (Not my dept., webmasters here pl. correct if I'm wrong.)

How did you exclude the network connection as the bottleneck?

It could even be the server. BTW, do you have admin privileges in the Moodle site? There are certain pages, which send massively more database queries for an admin compared to a normal user. (Search the 'Hardware and Performance' forum.)

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Saturday, 28 April 2012, 5:01 PM

Hi Visvanath. Yes Chrome solved it. I was having the problem at home during the Easter holidays on my home broadband connection. The main annoyance was that it FF was "hanging "when I was accessing Moodle.org (for which I don't have any admin privileges) but it was also slowing down on other sites too. On a regular basis every couple of minutes I would get "FF not responding" So I switched to Chrome for half an hour - it worked fine and fast - I switched back to FF and got the same issues as before. I have debated uninstalling FF and reinstalling -or even installing an earlier version as has been suggested by some online forums - but to be honest, I haven't seen a reason too, since Chrome works very well. I would only need FF to check webpages work correctly in different browsers, and I could put up with its annoyances for that amount of time. (I have IE9 on my computer for similar reasons, but I never use it) As with Ben, the only problem is that I can't easily edit our 1.9 school Moodle, but that will change shortly I hope.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Sunday, 29 April 2012, 1:56 AM

Hi Mary

I find it strange, that the JavaScript performance edge Chromium browser has over Firefox makes such a difference. Hope, somebody from subject would tell how to dig further.

Right now my Firefox waits a long time on each new page of moodle.org and stops blocking the whole browser with a pop-up message:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: http://ajax.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/nexp/v=3368044129/cloudflare.min.js:15

-> Stop script -> Continue.

Chromium browser does not have that problem.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Sunday, 8 July 2012, 12:43 AM

"Web Browser Grand Prix: Chrome 20, Opera 12, Firefox 13"
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228.html
(found in http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/07/07/1452211/firefox-notably-improved-in-toms-hardwares-latest-browser-showdown )

Are we now going to swap browsers?

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by ben reynolds - Thursday, 26 April 2012, 11:41 PM

I don't use them, but aren't there sites where you can share bookmarks? Like diigo.com

In the olden days, I made a web page of bookmarks (by hand).

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Friday, 27 April 2012, 12:34 AM

Yes -there is diigo etc but I don't use them either ! We can have our favourites in IE but for some reason not in Chrome, though I suspect he needs to reinstall it (our network manager) as I don't think he intended for us not to be able to bookmark things in Chrome. And knowing our county filtering system, if I made a webpage of bookmarks (which is a good idea) I'd then have to go through the process of getting it unblocked As for my FF issue, I deleted all my add ons - only had a couple anyway - but it made no difference and since I was on the same laptop on the same internet connection and FF was hanging while Chrome was working just fine, I decided to ditch FF and Chrome and I have been getting on fine ever since. (Except when updating school Moodle 1.9)

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Peacekeeper@FUTUREMARK, the interpretation

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Tuesday, 24 April 2012, 4:24 PM

Hi Matt

http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com is impressive! Is this the gaming industry or have I missed some other development?

Anyway, here are the results from my laptop, Lenovo x201, bought June 2010. For its UnixBench results see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=200362#p873963.

The question is the interpretation. On the website the result is compared to tablet PCs and smart phones, therefore no idea what the absolute values say. But the difference between Iceweasel and Chromium is significant.

I also noticed that the CPU iteself is not much taxed. Iceweasel saw a very short peak at 80% otherwise well below 50%. Chromiums stayed always below 50%, both as watched on Conky, with refresh rate 2 sec. I guess a lot happens in the GPU. I have the nouveau driver.

P.S. Sorry for the wacky formatting. I don't know how to get 'ASCII' formatting in moodle.org forums. If anybody has hints please post in '"Plain text format" is not monospace' http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=200351.

IceWeasel    Chromium

---------------------

1795 Points  2842 Points



Version info

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0 Iceweasel/10.0

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.63 Safari/534.3





Suite Iceweasel Chromium

-------------------------

Rendering 46,44 74.16

renderGrid01 161,05 fps  157.08 fps

renderGrid02 110,87 fps  136.41 fps

renderGrid03 4,79 fps  19.27 fps

renderPhysics 54,35 fps 73.23 fps



HTML5 Capabilities 5/7 6/7

webglSphere N/A  N/A

videoPosterSupport Yes  Yes

videoCodecH264 N/A  Yes

videoCodecTheora Yes  Yes

videoCodecWebM Yes  Yes

workerContrast01 Yes (3573,71 ops)  Yes (2964.70 ops)

workerContrast02 Yes (4927,17 ops)  Yes (3352.46 ops)

gamingSpitfire Yes (51,03 fps)  Yes (50.91 fps)

HTML5 Canvas 24,19  28.87

experimentalRipple01 37,03 fps  42.32 fps

experimentalRipple02 15,81 fps 19.69 fps

Data 23427,61  57622.49

arrayCombined 5013,50 ops  11719.50 ops

arrayWeighted 109475,00 ops  283318.50 ops

DOM operations 7785,20  11674.03

domGetElements 480907,50 ops  536750.00 ops

domDynamicCreationCreateElement 12221,00 ops 23729.00 ops

domDynamicCreationInnerHTML 18371,50 ops  30466.50 ops

domJQueryAttributeFilters 3444,00 ops  4267.00 ops

domJQueryBasicFilters 1104,50 ops  1769.00 ops

domJQueryBasics 2568,50 ops  3778.00 ops

domJQueryContentFilters 758,12 ops  2996.00 ops

domJQueryHierarchy 4409,00 ops 5673.50 ops

domQueryselector 29794,00 ops 21409.50 ops

Text parsing 90920,51  128681.91

stringChat 83759,50 ops  79156.50 ops

stringDetectBrowser 393280,00 ops  353182.00 ops

stringFilter 3144,00 ops  23163.00 ops

stringValidateForm 555234,00 ops  745743.00 ops

stringWeighted 108047,50 ops   73066.50 ops

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by James Broyles - Tuesday, 24 April 2012, 2:41 PM

"The outcome may or may not be a laughing matter!"

It's just Google TV ahead of its time, so was the Sega Channel. It's like fractal waves of Fibonacci coming at us constantly, Big Media will end up striking a deal with open source and internet everything and hardware manufacturers if they haven't already, one day we'll be able to interact with Moodle and our fridges at the same time for Moodle cooking classes, your fridge will be able to help you manage class recipes and ingredients if you want it to, and Facebook will let you verb about it when you cook to let friends enroll for the class, for the individual recipe, or to just get the plain recipe/share it/ask their fridge what they need for the recipe/plan it into the next shopping adventure. And Rachel Ray will have her own Moodle version her audience can enrol in.

You all think internet bumps are inconvenient now, wait til your stomache's on the line! Maybe everyone here isn't as enthusiastic about food as me, also

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by ben reynolds - Thursday, 19 April 2012, 3:45 AM

Hi Mary,

You're using a Win 7 laptop, right?

Hit cntl-alt-delete and start task manager, then click the performance tab. What you're doing is watching the CPU to see how busy it gets and watching the memory to see how much is used.

When you get that hesitation, see if the CPU is maxing out on cycles (likely).

Also, you can go to the Processes tab and click on the CPU column till you get the biggest users at the top of the column. Who's the hog?

The Google Docs effect would be a separate issue, I think. I experience it, too.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Thursday, 19 April 2012, 5:05 AM

Ooh Ben you have taken me into dark unchartered waters there and I am not sure I really understand the fancy green graphs and statistics it offers me. I tend only to use task manager when my laptop crashes and I have to stop a program (though that isn't the case with the internet - it just lags behind me) The CPU says anything between 0 and 60 depending on time; it keeps going up and down but not usually more than about 15 and the memory says it is 58% As for the CPU on the Processes tab I didn't know how to get the biggest users at the top -but Firefox seems to have the biggest number (That's the nearest icon I can get to a " sorry not very techie" emoticon!)

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by ben reynolds - Thursday, 19 April 2012, 8:24 PM

As they say in our south, "You did good."

If that's all you are seeing, then it is unlikely the CPU is maxing out. On my old desktop, in Win XP, I could watch my CPU max out (when you minimize Task Manager to the systray, it shows the CPU cycling). That doesn't seem to be happening.

So, when not typing in Google docs, what are you typing in that you get the hesitation?

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Thursday, 19 April 2012, 10:36 PM

Well - moodle.org , obviously! Trying to respond to forum posts on Using Moodle and here in the Lounge (see - it did it to me just then!!) Maybe it's not the internet - maybe it's just Moodle that can't keep up...

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by ben reynolds - Friday, 20 April 2012, 12:03 AM

Well, 'tisn't the Internet if you're in Moodle.

You'll remember the problem with students in Moodle being "inactive" so long that their session times out, and all their data is lost. That's because Moodle has not seen any activity while they were typing. Until you hit "Post to forum," Moodle only knows that it opened a place for you to type.

The hesitation you are seeing when you type has to be happening on your end because nothing goes out over the Internet until you hit "Post."

Something is capturing the attention of your computer to the point where it stores your keyboard strokes but doesn't display them. are you using any indexing software (Google desktop or Microsoft whatyacallit)?

If you open Task Manager, go to the Performance tab, and click the Resource Monitor, you can watch in almost real time. I'm watching desktop and MS Search hit my HD with fair frequency.

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Re: The internet can't keep up with me

by Mary Cooch - Friday, 20 April 2012, 12:08 AM

Ah! You are beginning to make sense now! I will venture out to the Task Manager and do some experiments... ( I may be some time...)

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