Online MCQ Activity Issue

Online MCQ Activity Issue

by Ifham Ahsan -
Number of replies: 1

Hi 


We have recently had an issue with Online Moolde MCQ Activity where the candidates were getting the following message " network connection lost autosave failed" consistently from 5 different exam venues. Please see the screenshot below: 

Inline image 1

So far our investigation has involved finding any issues in the server performance, however, we could not find any issues found on the server performance. Also the exam venue IT team informed there were no issues on the venue.

Some details 
  • Moodle Build: 3.1
  • Safe Exam Browser (SEB)  2.1.3
  • No of students appeared: 200 to 300

Are you able to advise us?

1. Are you aware of any known issues with MCQ plug-in especially with auto save functionality?
2. Are there any active issues with MCQ being worked on related to auto save functionality or any other potential issues that may have led to this error?

Please share your experience and thoughts

Regards
Ifham

Attachment Moodle MCQ Autosave issue.PNG
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In reply to Ifham Ahsan

Re: Online MCQ Activity Issue

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

I think the error message means exactly what it says: the JavaScript in the student's browser tired to contact the Moodle server to save the current responses, and it failed to get through. Therefore, there is probably a network problem, or a problem with the Moodle server.

Just because the IT people did not see any other symptoms of a problem does not mean that there wasn't one.

To know what actually happened, you really need to find some logs. E.g. do these autosave requests show up in the Apache logs on the Moodle server? If not, then definitely a network problem. (Well, what you are likely to see is a whole lot of autosave requests up to a certain time, then they stop.)

Or, the requests might be in the logs, but might suddenly change from 200 OK responses to a different status code. In that case, are there any errors in the PHP log?

Also, do you have monitoring (e.g. Nagios) tracking thinks like server CPU and memory use? If so, does that show anything? (I am guessing from what you say that you do have monitoring like this, and it shows nothing.)

Bottom line, this code almost always works reliably for many people around the world, and it has not changed in quite a long time. It would be quite surprising if there was a bug in it.

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