Troubleshooting very slow behavior for *some* web visitors

#21

I meant to check this over lunch and got involved in other things; I have several pretty old machines that might help, although not any Macs. The only Mac I have is a relatively recent work one that has no issues at all with it on Safari, FF, or Chrome. My work Windows machine is brand-new, and it’s fine in Chrome/Edge. I will check at home later on Windows/Ubuntu with Chrome/Brave/FF, but I can’t imagine any of them will have an issue except for one ancient Windows box… that I may or may not be able to revive. It does sound as though you’ve already limited to the problem to Macs.

Meanwhile, I’m finding myself absorbed by the students’ microessays. Must … stop … reading!

#22

Just to follow up: it turns out I was able to whittle my external-core file size down from nearly 10MB to under 4MB! This was achieved largely through clearing out some archival data, plus finding a few imported image-tiddlers that could be offloaded (and converted to webp for even leaner serving-up).

Although I have not totally eliminated google fonts, I’ve streamlined what’s getting loaded through google.

I have invited the students to try again, but have not yet heard back.

Many thanks again for everyone’s input!

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#23

Computer guy here. I haven’t read the whole thread, I only have time to pop in briefly. What I see a lot with older computers is they have little memory to begin with, and a lot of programs that are running in the background that they’ve forgotten about.

Under Windows, go to the Search bar, type “startup apps” and hit enter on the choice that comes up to see what is running at startup. You can turn some things off to free up memory but do not turn anything off if you are not 100% sure of what it does. Adobe is common for putting all kinds of unneeded programs on a PC.

And if your TW file is larger this can also cause problems that have little free memory/RAM.

Also, some people are in the habit of opening 50+ browser tabs, even on these old systems, which can use a LOT of memory. Have them close all tabs in all browser windows while using your site.

#24

Thanks for this.

Certainly, there are bits of advice I could give individual students about closing apps, etc.

What’s distinctive about this semester is that (for the first time) people seemed to be having trouble with my site that was way out of proportion to other ways in which their computers were slow.

Unfortunately, with intro students, I think my job is to make the site just work for pretty much all of them – plug and play as it were.

For each person who actually comes up to me with a complaint about accessing the site, I have to assume there are two who just shrug and say “the site doesn’t load, so… oh well.”

Weighing old-computer accessibility versus sophisticated-GUI-clarity (which is of course what TW is all about!) is a delicate balance!

#25

A few more things come to mind.

  • At the OS level they should clear their temp files.
  • At the browser level they should clear their cache.
  • In an extreme example, the last thing to do is clear all cookies and login data. They will have to login to sites again but this just might fix the issue after all.
  • Make sure they reboot the PC once a week. I do mine on Fridays after work. This actually helps solve many problems.
  • Don’t use Google fonts on your wiki that are accessed via the internet. I simplify things and minimize my use of external websites like that. Something like Google doesn’t go down that often but when it does, it’s just another variable to go wrong and people can spend hours assuming it’s on their end when it’s really on Google’s end. See next bullet.
  • Also last week I was seeing problems with Discord and Twitter. One problem was, after posting a twitter.com link, Discord would no longer load the text and image from the Tweet. Perhaps Twitter disabled this preview feature on their end for a while. This doesn’t have much to do with your site, except it’s an example of what could go wrong and they haven’t notified us.
#26

I’m late to this; but another possible difference for students quite recently: the 0-day vulnerability found in webp that had all browsers and lots of applications scrambling to release fixes.

Perhaps some web visitors experiencing slow behavior had their virus scanners working overtime. A web search for “webp vulnerability” might be advisable if this is your first time seeing anything about this.