Profile/Dashboard (not river) Slowdown

Hello,

I'm not sure if this really an appropriate place to ask, but if it's not, you may feel free to set mutant ninja pirate eels with laser-eyes on me.

I have a fairly big issue with my elgg site. I have prodded and poked and picked at things constantly for the past week trying to figure out the cause, but I've had no luck.

The problem is this:

Dashboard and profile pages are SLOW. Not slow to open, not slow to load. They are nearly impossible to navigate in Opera, and awfully sluggish in Firefox and IE. Poking around other people's elgg sites shows me that this is not merely a case of having a lot of widgets - I signed up for someone else's and crammed every widget they had on to the page and still didn't get the same slowdown. Nor anywhere near it.

Things affected are as follows:

* Widget edit box - opens jerkily, is difficult to place widgets because the dragging action is also jerky

* Scrolling is jerky

* Links take up to two seconds to highlight on mouseover

* Topbar menus open jerkily; links here are also slow to highlight and are not clickable until they do

vazco suggested that I had a bad widget in there somewhere causing the issue, but I've taken every single widget off my dashboard and it's an on/off thing: no widgets = fast, any widgets = slow.

I've tried: throwing PHP some extra RAM; blaming France (haha, just kidding); ensuring the mysql database is properly optimised; adding more RAM to the server (had to do this anyway); staring at various widgets' code to attempt to find any obvious issues that need fixing; tinkering with load order...

Has me stumped. :|

Any ideas?

Site is here if anyone wants to see what I mean.

  • It doesn't sound like a page generation problem - right? What you describe is all in the browser after the page has been loaded rather than waiting for the page to load. If not page generation, it can't be due to database or PHP.

    That would point to Javascript.

  • Hi,

    I don't know squat about code and that sort of thing, but have you tried to add one widget at a time to the page, and see if one of them slows the page down?

    I've tried to access your site but it gives me a "server not found" error.

  • @Cash: Right. I'm not sure what javascript could be causing the issue though. Firebug doesn't shed any light on it.

    @Nospheratt: This was the first thing I tried. A couple of the widgets do seem to cause -some- slowdown, but removing them does not remove the problem entirely. The only thing which does is having -no- widgets, which obviously isn't any good!

    And the link is fixed now. I misesd out an 'n' in 'net'. >.>

  • Do you have the caching system (eg. simplecache) turned on?

    Sometimes people turn it off when developing a site and then forget to turn it on when in production.

  • Yeah, it's turned on. I know this because I just (almost) finished a fairly major theme overhaul today.

    Well, hopefully finished. >.>

  • Playing around extensively with my test site leads me to a new avenue of investimigation.

    I recently went over to the riverdashboard after a poll of my users. But the number of widgets did not drop, which makes it seem pretty likely that all those dashboard widgets are still there. I'm not exactly sure how this could cause my problem, but since I couldn't replicate the issue on my test site (exactly the same file structure, new DB), I'm starting to think all those unused dashboard widgets are causing the problem...

    Unfortunately, the only way I know to fix this is to kill ALL widgets on the site and have the users readd the ones on their profiles.

    Does anyone know a better way? I just want all the dashboard widgets removed, preferably with minimal interruption for users.

  • Also, after some digging in my database, I just noticed this: there are 430 matches for the word "dashboard" in the table elgg_private_settings. Would those happen to be the dashboard widgets?

  • Hi, I don't know anything about the table, but maybe this plugin can help you: Remove widgets.

  • Thanks, Nospheratt.

    *brain suddenly starts working*

    Doh. I suppose I could actually LOOK at the code for that plugin (which I already have...)...

  • You're welcome. Sorry I can't help more, but I'm still learning.  :)