Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Hittesh Ahuja -
Number of replies: 12

Oddly enough the course page is quite responsive with IE10 ! 

We have some really long course pages on when you turn editing on the loading time is 5x more than when the page is loaded without turning editing on , only in Firefox (27 ) though!


With both Chrome and IE , the average load time is around 7 sec  but with FireFox its around 35 sec.  I believe Firefox is taking a lot longer to load the JS files than IE and Chrome, could this be the case ?


Using moodle 2.6.3 

Performace Overview seems OK 

Zend Opcache enabled

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In reply to Hittesh Ahuja

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Howard Miller -
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Which theme? 

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Hittesh Ahuja -

Modified theme based on bootstrap clean

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In reply to Hittesh Ahuja

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Howard Miller -
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Try it with a standard, core theme - e.g. clean. Just in case smile

As ever, make sure theme-designer mode is off. 

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Hittesh Ahuja -

Tried with the clean theme.. still the same sad 

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In reply to Hittesh Ahuja

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Michael Spall -
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Hittesh,


Make sure to update Firefox. Firefox 33 is the latest release. Also check to see what extensions you have enabled and rerun your tests again with all your extensions disabled. Third restore this course to the Moodle demo site or the Moodle QA site to see if it is something specific to your site.

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In reply to Michael Spall

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Hittesh Ahuja -

Hi All

I should probably mention that the course has a lot of resources added :

more than 20 URL resources

more than 15 file resources

more than 20 page resources 

more than 5 book resource

more than 5 forum discussions .....


I have tried it with Firefox addons disabled and the load time is still the same.Also since its a really huge course I cant seem to upload it to the demo / qa moodle site due to the size limit. 


Any other suggestions ?


Thanks in advance

Hittesh

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In reply to Hittesh Ahuja

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Michael Aherne -
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Hi Hittesh, whenever I've had a problem with Firefox loading pages much more slowly than other browsers, it's usually because I've switched caching off somewhere (either deliberately or by accident!).

To see if this is what's causing your problem you could try looking at the network tool in Firefox (Ctrl - Shift - Q) and refresh the page a couple of times. If you don't see most of the pages coming up as status 304 (not modified), it's possible that your browser isn't set up to cache pages properly.

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In reply to Michael Aherne

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Hittesh Ahuja -

Hi Michael,

If i refresh the same page in Firefox twice, it does load the pages with HTTP Status 304 Not Modified.

For chrome, it loads 133 requests,3.5 MB transferred and 8.90 seconds to load

For firefox, it loads 129 requests, 3979.94 kb transferred and 76.53 seconds to load. 

Did i mention it hangs the browser tab when trying to load the JS in FF whereas Chrome continues loading the pages without making it inoperative

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In reply to Hittesh Ahuja

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Usman Asar -
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Hittesh,

Have you tried testing it on some other machine? I am an avid user of FF, but it does throw in a towel at times (making pages irresponsive), No wonder why Chrome's market share is increasing everyday. Though I haven't had any issue regarding the speed difference on any of the Browsers (using 6 browsers for testing).

There MAY be a plug-in causing that longer load times in FF, can you just test by turning off plug-ins one by one and seeking out culprit?

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In reply to Usman Asar

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Hittesh Ahuja -

This is really odd ! Iv'e tried the page again with add on disabled. 


Attaching the network log screenshot with only Firebug turned on .


http://tinypic.com/r/2zp5gqo/8

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In reply to Hittesh Ahuja

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Tim Hunt -
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One thing that looks wrong is all those 200 OKs.

The browser should be caching most of those files, so most requests should be getting 304 Not modified responses. I would start by working out why that is not working. (Look at the HTTP headers.)

The headers on an image from this server look like:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=31104000
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="combo"
Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2015 16:21:40 GMT
Etag: "98e2cd22471a90d1b48a9aa36b3bedfa0f25bcc2"
Expires: Mon, 01 Feb 2016 16:21:40 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 05 Feb 2015 09:39:34 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Firefox-Spdy: 3.1
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle course page slow only with Firefox

by Hittesh Ahuja -

Tim,

I do get 304 not modified for the page when it is refreshed for the second time.That has managed to bring the load time down to 27.79 . Still confused as to why Chrome takes only 7 secs ( returning 304's) and FF takes around 4x more the time to load the same page . 

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