Frequent timeouts and general slowness with Edit+

(*) #1

Before I dig too much further into this problem, I’m curious as to whether anyone else experiences the Edit+ interface (or possibly the JavaScript API or Squiz Edge infrastructure) being unreliable. I ask because firstly, the Edit+ interface takes a long time (15 seconds) to reflect a save whilst editing in Admin interface takes 0.5 seconds; and secondly, I’m regularly seeing 504 Gateway Timeouts when using Edit+ leading to saves that “appear” to never finish (but actually did).

Here’s how it goes:

  1. Load Edit+ for a Page asset
  2. Make a basic change, such as changing the Page Name
  3. Click Save.
  4. The standard Matrix progress spinner shows, whiting out the rest of the page.
  5. Two POST requests are fired to edit.js and responses are seen as 200 OK within 0.5 to 1.5 seconds (average). The first HTTP response’s JSON array appears to indicate a successful change (JSON says Attribute "name" has been successfully set to...) and the second is a successful acquisition of the locks for the asset (JSON says "all" locks are now acquired...).

For saves that do appear to complete, it takes between 10-20 seconds from clicking the Save button to seeing the save appear to be completed when the “tick” icon replaces the spinner and the Edit+ UI is accessible again. For note, there’s 3 more JSON requests that succeed occur after the 10-20 second mark. By contrast, the same change of Page name via the admin interface takes 0.5 seconds to be reflected in the UI.

For saves that don’t appear to finish, the following continues on from point 5 above:

  1. A third long-running POST to edit.js produces a 504 Gateway Timeout at the 60 second mark (presumably the timeout set in nginx/OpenResty). I don’t have details as to what was in this JSON request, but it is seemingly the 3rd request above that is failing.
  2. The progress spinner continues to show and never changes.
  3. Give up waiting after several minutes and reload the page and note the changes have actually saved (well before now).
  4. If you wait long enough, the page will go black with an EES POST timeout error.

As you might expect, having to wait 20 seconds for edits to save (or just appear to) is really frustrating for users. And having the saves appear to never finish is even worse for editors.

For note, the only regular 504 Gateway Timeouts I see in the admin interface are via the Quick Search (which then 504s the heading) and more recently the HIPO popup; but very uncommonly when making changes to details/content/metadata.

Thoughts? Anyone seen this before?

Matrix Version: 5.3.3.0

(Bart Banda) #2

Hey David,
I’ve seen it happen before, but for various reasons of which I can’t remember the details of.

I suggest your best course off action is to lodge a support ticket with Squiz for them to look into deeper to see where the issue is.

Saves being fast in Admin but slow in Edit+ is very strange but seems like a narrowed down problem where the requests in /_edit and the JS API are the culprints, but could as well be Edge related.

(*) #3

Thanks for the thoughts. I’ll lodge a support request and then report back here with the cause of the problem or any other updates for anyone else interested.

Edit: I’ve also just adjusted the Edit+ overlayTimeout down to 60 seconds. This can at least give a user some visual feedback and a clear warning. If you wanted to be doubly-sure it wasn’t a really slow server response, then 61 seconds would guarantee the request had resulted in a 504 Gateway Timeout.