Frog - Slow ! Pulling my hair out

[FragglePete]

So this week we started using Frog in anger, getting Students to log into Frog for the first time and ICT Teachers using the first ICT Lesson to explain things and show them whats what.

 

However, as soon as peeps starting logging into the thing, it's turned into a lethargic toad! Really slow logins, an age to display anything and even getting into the Toolkit seems problematic. Only really occurs when people first logon. Major disappointment.

 

We've raised a call, and monitoring should be occuring by Frogtrade, but I'm now doubting my ability in my network thinking that maybe I've set something up wrong, or is something upsetting it, but generally everything else is fine.

 

Just wondered if anybody else has suffered this?

 

Pete

[dsm]

Hi,

 

Had Frog for a few years now and there's never been a problem with speed - that's one of the best bits because it's hosted on site. Have you got your DNS set up properly?

 

Regards

[ranj]

Sounds like your network speed or like the previous post with DNS.

 

What happens if you try http://frogserver. Are you using a secure site https to access it?

 

Have you tried in a browser going directly to the frog servers ip address. That will tell you if its DNS related.

[jtuerena]

If this application connects to the site of Frog. Maybe they have something set up wrong and not you? Page refresh is just one.

[FragglePete]

DNS is fine, the same problem also when using its IP address. I've even been going through the DNS servers checking everything is as it should be. When we experienced a 'slow down' I connected to another internal server hosting our booking system as this was as fast as normal. Appears to happen primarily at start of lesson when the FrogLive component starts logging in all the students, it just seems to grind to a halt.

 

Had a few enquiries from Frogtrade on setup, but nothing detailed yet from them; 2nd Line support never seem to be at their desk when I call.

 

I'm getting my arsed chewed my SMT at the mo. Point of hosting it internally was so it would be nice and quick.

 

Pete

[FN-GM]

A shot in the dark here but is there anything on there pointing to an external website? Maybe if there is it could be a dead link or the site maybe blocked?

 

What is it like when you access it from your home connection?

[FragglePete]

Hmmmmm.... Interesting. We do have the I AM Learning Widget (which links itself externally) on the main template. I guess I could try moving that elsewhere as a long shot.

 

Network infrastructure is pretty much brand new; in the fortunately position that during recent refurb work we've managed to get a whole new backbone, new server room and core switch (HP ProCurve 5106zl) out of it. We really noticed the difference when we moved over to it about a year ago.

 

Pete

[mikkistorey]

Have you found anything that works yet?

[MicrodigitUK]

I’m thinking this might be a Frog live related issue with PHP logon requests. I know when another school in Wilts (beginning with S) lunched Frog to students had a problem with speed at the start of lessons. Might be worth giving them a ring and see if they are still having this issue.

 

I currently don’t have any problems with speed but not using Frog Live. Problem with Frog live is you go from only the students needing to access Frog logging to, all users on the network logging on then also logging onto Frog.

 

I know of another two school using Moodle that had similar problems when launching the VLE as the home page. The solution to this was a PHP accelerator. I’m not a Frog expert but to my knowledge they don’t use any PHP accelerators. This would be a development problem for Frogtrade to look at.

 

I’m going to launch the Frog live for all users soon (next couple of weeks)so will let you know what happens to speed.

Edited September 13, 2010 by MicrodigitUK
spelling

[EdWhittaker]

 

I’m going to lunch the Frog live for all users soon (next couple of weeks)so will let you know what happens to speed.

 

So, would that be a buffet lunch, then; or something more formal?

[MicrodigitUK]

So, would that be a buffet lunch, then; or something more formal?

 

launch

[adamchapman]

So this week we started using Frog in anger, getting Students to log into Frog for the first time and ICT Teachers using the first ICT Lesson to explain things and show them whats what.

 

However, as soon as peeps starting logging into the thing, it's turned into a lethargic toad! Really slow logins, an age to display anything and even getting into the Toolkit seems problematic. Only really occurs when people first logon. Major disappointment.

 

We've raised a call, and monitoring should be occuring by Frogtrade, but I'm now doubting my ability in my network thinking that maybe I've set something up wrong, or is something upsetting it, but generally everything else is fine.

 

Just wondered if anybody else has suffered this?

 

Pete

 

We are having the exact same problem... we've had around 120+ users connected at once during the introductory ICT lessons and it has just ground to a halt.

 

We have however noticed that it loads much faster in ff instead of their recommended IE. Contacted frog tech support, but heard nothing back yet.

 

Is anyone aware of the maximum concurrent users?

[MicrodigitUK]

Is anyone aware of the maximum concurrent users?

 

You would of thought it was the maximum number of students and staff in school, but I doubt it.

 

I think Frogtrade rally need to look into this ASAP as more and more schools implement Frog with Frog Live it seems that the PHP processing can’t cope. Most of the PHP requests are replicated with multiple users pulling up the same pages/content. That’s where PHP accelerators come in to play by cashing and reusing popular content. This saves the server having to process every signal PHP request for the same page/content.

Edited September 13, 2010 by MicrodigitUK

[FragglePete]

Oh Christ! Thanks for the replies!

 

I've spoken to Frog today, and the engineer mentioned they saw my post here ! to all FrogTrade Engineers!

 

This morning I went through all my DNS Server settings, and double checked everything. Had a few erroneous settings, which I've corrected, cleared out a couple of things and dealt with any DNS messages (only informational) within the Event Logs. Nothing though I believe would be affecting this.

 

In discussion with them, I've removed the I Am Learning Widget from the main template so its now not loading an externally hosted logo image on every page to see if this helps and tomorrow (Tuesday) we shall see how it goes.

 

Will be getting in touch with our 'partner' School to discuss with them; will be in touch MicrodigitUK !. SMT, let alone the whole School are looking at me to get this fixed, I'm not happy. I'm even thinking of asking another Network Manager from a neighbouring School to pop in and double check my setup, just to make sure I'm not missing something obvious.

 

Pete

Edited September 13, 2010 by FragglePete

[adamchapman]

I've found that accessing frog through our external address that is pointed through our ISA server seems to help a little. I suspect this is due to the built in cache held in the ISA server.

DNS appears OK. nslookup and pings all resolve the correct IP of the frogserver.

 

We are authenticating against AD - could this possibly be the slow link in the chain?

[36Degrees]

The only issues we have had with Frog were resolved in ways already mentioned i.e. go directly to the internal address of http://frogserver but we aren't using Frog live. Going by these posts I'm glad we aren't!!!

[FragglePete]

Can't really give feed back on today, not many ICT Lessons occurred so load was not as much. I've been dipping in and out of Frog all day today sorting out other issues and it seemed ok with no issues on the scale of what we've seen already, just the occasional "I'm thinking about it for a sec" moments. Just really starting to think the FrogLive component is at fault; it just seems to bog it down so much. Will keep monitoring over the next day or so, but I'm not letting this rest.

 

Pete

[tomdawson]

@FragglePete, @MicrodigitUK tipped me the wink towards this thread, thought I'd just give my two cents.

 

At the start of year it was a little bit sticky. I'm guessing it was because there were three or four IT rooms full of kids all logging into Frog for the first time with FrogLive, but to be honest that shouldn't really be a problem, as it's (supposedly) designed to cope with that sort of load. It certainly wasn't unusable, but there was a noticeable difference.

 

To be perfectly honest it has eased up now and seems perfectly acceptable. There's the occasional pause like you mentioned, but nothing too serious. Again as someone else pointed out it works like a dream with Firefox but always seems a little bit sticky when you're working with IE (which, considering I spend most of my time in the toolkit, is a bit of a pain).

 

FrogLive does seem to be a real issue though. I can't understand why it takes the thing such a long time to log in when you compare it with the web-based login page at http://frogserver/ - I'm hoping they work on the speed issue as far as that is concerned. It will very often take 6/7 seconds to log in from clicking the button. Very odd.

 

But overall our Frog box seems to be relatively OK, apart from the upgrade that took our box down during the school day and yesterday's kernel panic episode (PM me for details if you like!).

 

HTH!

Tom, Sheldon.

[FragglePete]

Thanks Tom, was going to phone you guys but still a tad busy running around here.

 

ICT Teachers here are reporting back to me that Frog is still running slow, the word 'sticky' that you used is a good description. I will be feeding back to Frog with demands that this gets sorted.

 

Pete

[MicrodigitUK]

 

Why does FrogLive reserve more memory than explorer?

 

That can’t be right and is probably just sloppy Visual Studio coding.

 

It also won’t help things and will lead to slowing the workstations down.

[tomdawson]

MicrodigitUK, good to see you were spending your Saturday night productively!

 

For about the last twenty minutes Frog has been running like really really slow-running treacle. No major stuff going on here, just a normal amount of users online, but it was taking about two minutes just to get to the login page (no FrogLive)...and now, all of a sudden, it's a speedy as anything. Really odd.

 

How's things with you this so far this week, Pete?

 

UPDATE: Just checked FrogLive on my machine here at work, it's using 63MB! What the hell?!

Edited September 20, 2010 by tomdawson

[FragglePete]

Took a couple of days off, needed a break but back in again tomorrow to deal with all the little things that have cropped up since our Win7 Deployment.

 

Frog got in touch to say they've tweaked things and should now be quicker (who knows what they've tweaked).

 

However, our box croaked on Friday. Some bright teacher tried uploading a 800Mb Video File (I kid you not!) to it, this subsequently filled up the temp partition and the thing stopped working. From the e-mails and texts I got from my techs it would seem it was identified quickly and Frog got it up and running again, they are now keen to re-partition the drives to give the temp partition more space. Not sure if this is necessary; it shouldn't have let the upload happen anyway. More training for staff required!

 

Will look into how FrogLive is sitting on our systems this week and hope things are better.

 

Pete