Something is killing V11!

[johngwms]

There seems to be some possible confusion here about site performance online and the speed of operation when editing the site offline.

I have added blockifs around all external calls in my code so I would not expect there to be an issue with Preview mode beng turned on when editing a page.

I do not understand why I shouldnt be able to preview a page without Actinic almost grinding to a halt. Am I missing something? I understand that is how Actinic currently seems to behave; I am questioning why it has to be this way.

[I-CC]

In preview mode the status of online and offline is not really true, as the preview if left to its own devices will action any and all code used in the relevant page, thus making calls to external sources of data and connection if they exist in the page, thus it makes online calls and connections when working with it locally.

If you have prevented the calls with a blockif for isnotpreviewmode and you are still having the issue, then afraid I could not say what your issue is, only to say that logic suggests if it was fine a week or 2 ago and now it is not and you have not upgraded Actinic, then nothing will have changed in Actinic and thus a 3rd party issue is affecting the performance, which many have found it to be external calls to the likes of addthis, facebook, plus one, soapbox and many others too numerous to guess at.

I did not go into the depths of doing one at a time, and simply prevented any of them from functioning whilst it was previewing locally and that solved it straight away so I left it at that, but doing it on a one by one basis will I guess have narrowed down the culprit.

[feemish]

johngwms,

What happens if you manaully disconnect from the internet.. like.. pull the plug out.. Do you still have issues then?

[NormanRouxel]

Maybe something slipped through.

Preview a page. Locate the PreviewHTML_Administrator folder. Open P_index.html (which is what the Preview uses) in Firefox and use FF's tools to locate any .js, Flash, etc files, do page diagnostics or whatever.

For Design Preview, relevant files are in DesignPreviewHTML_Administrator. Best check there too.

[meden]

Isolating the call to to the Google Plus One API with a blockif and putting the jQuery script on my own server (rather than calling it externally at all) fixed the issue for me

[intrapreneur]

I have this exact same problem - again with no warning or changes made to the site

Same thing here, 10 days ago or so Actinic V11 slowed down to a crawl when moving between Products/Sections offline.

So far I have removed completely Addthis and Google+1 with no effect.

Probably completely wrong but I am blaming MS .NET Framework updates for this as there 4-5 of these daily now!

[intrapreneur]

johngwms,

What happens if you manaully disconnect from the internet.. like.. pull the plug out.. Do you still have issues then?

Yes pulling the plug seems to fix it!

[johngwms]

johngwms,

What happens if you manually disconnect from the internet.. like.. pull the plug out.. Do you still have issues then?

Yes, that has also fixed it for me.

I will need to do some more in depth checking that I have blockif'd all external calls.

Thanks for that very pragmatic suggestion.

I still think the Actinic developers should look at this issue. Before I tried this it was faster to preview a page in Firefox than in Actinic.

Work arounds are all very well as temporary fixes but they are not a permanent solution.

John

[Mike Hughes]

I find I'm in agreement with John on this.

Using Blockifs to prevent external items loading in preview mode does solve the slow down issue, but then stops you being able to see what your pages actually look like. The only way is to upload to a test domain / sub-directory and that can be a painfull process for large sites.

Surely the best way to solve this problem is for Actinic to have a switch in it. Similar to 'isnotpreview' but maybe 'isexternalload' so that external loading can be turned on or off in preview mode. You'd still need the blockifs but at least they could become standard practice rather than optional.

Mike

[johngwms]

I think there is a deeper problem in Actinic that needs investigating by the developers.

The evidence to me is clear:

1) I have been working just fine with Preview Mode turned on until a couple of weeks ago. This is without the blockifs being inserted. The site is still about the same size (approx 1000 products).

2) Many other users are reporting the same problem.

3) The problem does not show itself when Previewing in Firefox.

I suspect that Actinic is doing more than just loading external site objects when the problem is present. Maybe it is being forced to do some other internal checking which is not necessary when previewing a single page.

John

[feemish]

I'm on v10, but my site.. same as yours, started to hang hideously probably at the same time as everyone elses.. So yes something changed.. Pulling the plug on the internet returned actinic to the original speed so it was clear something online was causing the slowdown..
pullin the plug was not a workaround but helped to show me that he fault was definately to do with online communication,
I went through all my external javascripts adding blockIfs and luckily (for me) that has solved it.

If you have Blockifd all external javascript and its still slow then I dont know..
Maybe as Norman says something has slipped through?
Maybe v11 works differently from v10.. ?

[NormanRouxel]

John

Take care with the Magic Zoom Plus code that you're using. I found I had to set option

'click-to-initialize': true

in order to get good performance when Previewing.

Using a blockif to set that option in Preview mode only may be useful.

Also, other Magic Toolbox add-ons may be retrieving images in the background. Worth checking them too.