Anyone notice a considerable performance difference with IE vs Firefox?

Anyone notice a considerable performance difference with IE vs Firefox?

by Ross Hendricks -
Number of replies: 2

Hopefully someone here can provide a little insight to a big problem we're having. First here is some background on our server specs:

  • Moodle: 1.7+
  • OS: Fedora Core 5
  • Processors: Dual Xeon 3.20GHz
  • RAM: 8GB
  • PHP: 5.1.6 with eAccelerator v0.9.5
  • Enable Record Cache: Enabled
  • We are NOT using MySQL to store sessions
  • Moodle logs are rotated regularly
  • SSL enabled for login only
  • Both Moodle data and MySQL reside on the same server.
  • Load is relatively low. We are only piloting moodle to approx 20 teachers (300 users). The most concurrent connections we have at any one time is probably 75, but the problem described below occurs even when there are practically no active connections to the server.

Problem:
When navigating moodle within Firefox, everything works great. Pages load very quickly. However, when using IE (in this case 7, but also seems to behave the same way in IE6), page loads are painfully slow. This includes initial loading of moodle, as well as navigating course content. For example, we had a teacher go into her course to modify her settings and when she clicked the settings link, the page took 10-15 seconds to load. Going back and doing the same thing in Firefox on any course took less than 2 seconds.

I noticed a little bit of a performance pickup when I installed eaccelerator, but not much. One thing that I did notice, however, is that in IE when I leave caching at automatic (default setting), the performance is as described above. But when I change the setting to never check for new page content, it loads the page very quickly. 

Has anyone else had any similar problems? Thanks!

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In reply to Ross Hendricks

Re: Anyone notice a considerable performance difference with IE vs Firefox?

by Myles Carrick -
hi Ross,

My observations re. IE:

Certainly there appear to have been some recent AJAX issues with IE. The button to delete activities was causing grief, although I noticed that a recent revision downgraded that capability (i.e. removed the JS action that performed deletions). This had been an IE-only issue.

I've noticed that very large courses with a correspondingly large main course page (we have some around 10 screens at SXGA) take a HUGE time to render in IE - particularly with AJAX enabled and of course only when editing is on. It's neither network latency nor server time - both are negligible (at least inside our network) but rather the time to actually build the page.
There seems a considerable difference too in the way that the different browsers build the page. Firefox seems content to gradually build the page (and even then, it does so quickly) whereas IE waits (for up to several seconds) then shows it in one hit. With AJAX turned off for the user this isn't even noticeable.

We haven't found any such issues with pages other than those with AJAX features. You mention that it's the course Settings page... does it do so even if the html editor is disabled? I can't think of anything else on that page that is likely to cause a browser such an issue...?

That's interesting about the effect of the cache settings. Does it affect the actual operation of any functions?

Cheers - good luck!
MC
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In reply to Ross Hendricks

Re: Anyone notice a considerable performance difference with IE vs Firefox?

by Cristi Ionescu -
Hello,
I am not surprised at all when I hear about issues with IE7.
I installed it and removed it in 3 minutes from my computer. It has a lot of bad issues, of which the speed is the most disturbing. I am pretty sure that your problem is also related to the Windows updates. I've recently had some of the difficulties you describe but with other websites (not Moodle). What makes me think it's related to the updates is the fact that it's doing the same in IE6, which shouldn't be happening.
I don't know yet what you could do (besides setting IE not to check for new page content), but hopefully we'll find out soon.
The bottom line for me is that at the moment IE7 is a VERY poor browser.
Ah.. one thing you could do, is opening the page from Firefox, with the IE tab extension's rendering engine - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/
I hope this is helpful.
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