Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

by Gary Lebowitz -
Number of replies: 8

Hello, I just upgraded from 1.9.19 to 2.2.3 and for the first time am having timeout problems when editing quizzes or forums or most other things. After adding one or two questions in quiz, for example, it get a message saying that the system has timed out; try again. In the address field I see my domain name followed by:

course/modedit.php

with the timout message at the top left of a white html page. I thought there might be a problem with php5.ini so I upped the Maximum Execution Time, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. Any ideas what's wrong here?

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In reply to Gary Lebowitz

Re: Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

How long are we talking about and what *exactly* is the message?

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

by Gary Lebowitz -

Hi,

Thanks for the response. 

The message is: Your request timed out. Pleast retry the request

in the URL field I see my domain name followed by:

.../course/modedit.php

I tried to up the timout limit by going into php5.ini, but I'm not sure this is the problem. By the way do you happen to know what figure to put after the = sign to increase the timeout limit to the max? But, again, I've never seen this problem before. This happens only when creating and trying to populate quizzes, the description fields of forums, etc. If I type extremely fast or redo a couple of times I can get things done before getting the above message, but this is no way to work! Not if I want to maintain my sanity. smile Could this also be a PHP thing? I did not have this problem in Moodle 1.9.19 hosted on GoDaddy shared Linux hosting; only after upgrading manually to 2.2.3 did it start. Thanks in advance for any assistance with this.

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In reply to Gary Lebowitz

Re: Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

That's not a Moodle error. If you do a quick Google search you'll see loads of reports of people getting that message with all manner of software hosted by GoDaddy. I would suggest that your next step is to seek advice from their technical support. It's probably a 'helpful' message as a result of the web server process crashing but it's highly unlikely you'll debug that from your end.

Let us know how you get on!

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

by Gary Lebowitz -

Hi again, 

After hours of struggling and a call to the friendly folks at GoDaddy it turned out that the problem was not the paramenters I set in php5.ini, but inode issues on their server. (I'm on entry-level shared Linux hosting, and as the saying goes, one gets what one pays for--well, almost wink). In other words, it's because it is overloaded with many other sharers that I intermittently get this error. Now, here's my new question: If I upgraded from my current 2.2.3 version of Moodle to 2.3 would this help things. Or in general is 2.3 worth upgrading to if I have time to do this (which I do). Are there any things I should know, particularly which version of PHP must I use? I currently have access via GoDaddy to version 5.3. Good enough? Regards, and sorry for confusing you; it's just that GoDaddy confused me at first by not escalating the problem up to where they finally did last night. The other way to go is to move to Ultimate Shared Hosting, which they say would fix my problem. But I'm not 100% sure it will; and I might have to go all the way up to Dedicated. But not if there's a simpler/cheaper way to do what I want to do. Any tips would be appreciated regarding all or parts of the above.

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In reply to Gary Lebowitz

Re: Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hi Gary

Good that you got your problems solved. Also thanks for reporting back for the benefit of the others.

The other question, whether 2.3 will improve performance, I don't think so. There are many performance related problems reported in this forum. Go through the recent posts.

Please note that the topic of this forum is performance. Could you pl. discuss the general pros and cons of various Moodle versions, apart from performance comparisons, in the relevant forums. The "Installation problems" and "General problems" forums are the most likely candidates. Also refer to Moodle docs before posting.
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

by Gary Lebowitz -

Hi Visvanath,

Thanks for getting back to me on the performance of 2.3 vs 2.2.3. I have plenty to do interacting with GoDaddy to get the type of performance I want/need without throwing another ball in the air to juggle. wink No problem going to Installation Problems and General Problems for future questions re performance problems. It's just because I'd had 2.2.3 running for a good 3-4 months with no performance problems that I thought it useful to ask about sudden-onset performance problems here in Hardware and Performance. Maybe it would be better to separate the two, unless the aim of the forum is precisely to discuss the interrelation between the two.   

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In reply to Gary Lebowitz

Re: Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hi Gary

This discussion is about performance and is in the right place. If you have performance problems in the future, please don't hesitate to report here.

I was talking about the remaining topics, general comparisons of Moodle, unrelated to performance, should go to their respective forums.

P.S. May be worth reading in this light, "Go Daddy! (Where to?)" http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=193106.
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Timeout problems when editing in Moodle 2.2.3

by Gary Lebowitz -

Hi Visvanath, 

Thanks for this reference. By the way, after an "interesting" week or so and a violent trip along a very steep learning curve everything is running smoothly on my Ulitmate Shared Hosting plan with GoDaddy. Learned much thanks to you and the other forum participants and simply by banging my head long enough and and hard enough against the wall that I finally figured out how to tweak things properly and make my installation hum away pleasantly. Thanks again for your help and that of the others who got back to me along the way. Regards, Gary

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