Polls and browser hanging/slowdowns

meta
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When a thread gets a few polls built up the whole bbs slows down, esp. when they’re the last/late comments. Maybe the polls are polling too much?

It’s happening here:

And has come up on the Questions thread and elsewhere when there were a lot of polls. I’ve seen this on Safari on iOS and Mac OS, and on Chrome on Mac OS (it just threw an “Aw, snap” error page with the Style Manual page).

@codinghorror for this kind of thing that’s pretty Discourse-specific should we be putting them in meta on BoingBoing or would it make more sense/be more effective to take it to https://meta.discourse.org/ ?

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Not sure, I know @sam fixed a big regression with polls about a month ago but that is long gone.

Perhaps you are thinking of this topic?

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Visiting:

I’m seeing the same hangs/unresponsiveness.

I scrolled from the top to post 8 and Chrome’s tab was hanging hard and threw an “Aw, Snap” error in the tab.

I tested in Safari scrolling through from the top got to about post 45 before the tab was locked hard with a mostly white page and a spinner.

I tested in Firefox, and it managed to scroll to the bottom with a lot of jagginess, then it threw a “Warning: unresponsive script” error.

Happened on the iPad/Safari as well.

Can you scroll through that page without a huge JS spike/hang on whatever browser/platform you’re using?

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@zogstrip can check as well. Could be that those posts need to be rebaked.

I scrolled to the bottom of that topic just now on iPad Pro and iOS 9.3 with no issues.

Are you running browser plugins? I don’t have a Mac to test on but never seen recurring problems with that topic in Chrome/Windows even before @sam’s fix a month ago.

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I was running Ghostery and AdBblock on Chrome/Safari. I disabled them, restarted the browsers and tested again. I’m still getting the hangs and CPU spinning out of control when I scroll by a lot of polls.

I’ve got no plugins on FF (it’s just for testing).

The iPad’s an iPad mini 2 running iOS 9.3 and is totally vanilla with no extensions/browser changes. It hangs hard, sometimes recovers eventually, sometimes crashes and reloads the page.

You can’t get a stack trace in text from FF’s debugger (there’s a pending feature request on this), but the GUI stack trace for the hang looks like:

Screen Shot 2016-03-27 at 11.20.46 AM.png2552×1342 783 KB

Sorry, I know a screenshot blows and the minification doesn’t help either but maybe it might help point to something.

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Browser hangs, temporary and perpetual have never let up for me on FF, always updated, ghostery and ublockO off or on but I have noticed the terminal variety happening more often lately.

I’ve just gotten used to killing the browser process and reloading maybe twice a day for the last couple of weeks.

Seems like it’s something on my system, lots of ram, raid0 cache drive, after effects hums away but the rig throws the toys out the pram on the reg with bbs.

But I’m a committed patient.

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It’s definitely possible there is poll wankery going on, as I mentioned, @sam fixed a huge problem with polls about a month ago, I think around runaway message bus polling with polls.

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Polls have never caused me browser problems on BoingBoing before today, but I just got the similar browser problem in FF on the same “BBS Style Manual!” thread.

In my case the “A script on this page is running too long” message appeared a couple times; I think once was when jumping to the bottom of the page due to a reply and then scrolling back up to where I was.

I think something got broken very recently.

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Polls have been killing me for the last week or so. FF desktop (latest) and mobile. Crashes my desktop completely, which then kills my smart tunnel into the office. Stupid Java plugin. Stupid person browsing during work.

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OK, yeah, scrolling rapidly through a thread with a poll will now apparently wedge the script engine.

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Yeah this looks like it might be related to the vdom rewrite @eviltrout. I can repro Chrome hanging on that topic on my desktop now.

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(Data point: MBA 2014 running Chrome with plugins but non specific to BBS or actively doing anything on BBS at all —> Browser skips a beat when scrolling past the poll but doesn’t hang up.)

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While I love polls more than anyone should, I will refrain from posting them until this gets sorted.

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should nemomen allowed to avoid polls?

[ ] yes
[ ] no
[ ] what was the question?

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Now I’m having problems with threads that have polls. I can’t get the BBS Style Manual Thread to load - crashes my browser every time (I’m on Firefox, and I generally don’t use other browsers).

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Yep, this is a high priority fix for @eviltrout as it’s kinda real real bad. Hopefully will get resolved tomorrow.

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Ok we just deployed a fix see if polls are less Devastatin’ Dave now

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Alas, I tested in Safari and got to post 9 before it hung and most CPU cores were spiking. I tested in FF and got a little further before:

Screen Shot 2016-03-28 at 12.49.01 PM.png2850×1460 598 KB

Is there any latency before the fix gets fully deployed or possible caching/etc.?

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Oops there was a build error I did not notice, so that change actually didn’t get deployed as I thought it did. Should be deployed now though, try again. Sorry about that.

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Yes, massively improved load/scroll time/CPU load - looks fixed. Thanks!

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