Quizmaker Error in certain environments
Nov 29, 2011
I have a client who used a 3rd party vendor to develop a course in articulate 9 for an external audience. They have some engage interactions and quizes through out the presentation with some complex branching for the 8 or so quizes in the course. The course has narration on every slide including quizes and interactions.
For some users at specific clients, they get to a point in the course where they clearly are entering an interaction or quiz and the course freezes with the spinner spinning. We believe for some users the interaction / quiz is getting stuck trying to load MP3 files and the player is not able to handle the exception.
The course is delivered through the LearnerWeb Enterprise LMS and has been tested both as an AICC or SCORM course and the same effect occurs. They officially want users to only use IE7 and above although other browsers will work fine except for this issue. The LMS is designed to handle extremely large concurrency and it is not a load issue. The LMS is not java based nor loading the content in frames and is a clean implemntation of the AICC standard and SCORM model with rich profiling of courseware/lms communication. For the great majority of users it works fine, but a significant amount of time is being taken on a small, but large enough population that the course may get scaled back or worse repurposed into another tool if the frustration get's high enough.
We've inspect the web server logs, LMS app server logs, AICC/SCORM and user logs as well as run the course while Fiddler (web debug proxy is running) and in articulate debug mode. The effect seems to occur well into the course and when trying to load a quizmaker or interaction and a large number of audio (mp3s) are sent to the user's machine at one time. It seems that the player will send all the MP3 files for the interaction / quizmaker at one time and in some environments this overwhelms the player. We can clearly see the effect as not all MP3s arrive to the workstation where it fails compared to when it works when all the MP3s do arrive. There is nothing in the file naming convention of the MP3s as they have no white space or marginal characters in the name and the names are small. The mystery gets more strange as running fiddler on the same machine where the effect occurs under the same user account prevents the effect from occuring and the course gets past the page that is locking the course.
Some other forum posts talk about quizes not loading but there seems to be no other reference to this efffect that I can find. Has anyone seen this before? We're fairly certain removing the audio for the quizes will fix the issue, but I think this is extreme and before the developers start to scale back the course, any guidance from the community would be appreciated.
Thanks - Phil
5 Replies
Just a few more details. The LMS server log shows no application errors. The AICC / SCORM logs show clean communication. The freeze is usually when loading the 1st big quiz (22 questions). There is plenty of memory and we've replicated the effect after a reboot and only running the browser with browser add-ons both visible and non-visible disabled and any browser error messaging enabled. Clients are running the latest version of flash and the course is running the latest version of flash supported by Articulate (as far as I know). We know one client is running a proxy server that is doing some sort of intrusion prevention and filters incoming files and we think there might be some throttling going on, but the use of fiddler muddies the water as the same user, same machine, same settings but runnig fiddler in the background and the MP3 files all arive to the course.
Hey Phil, welcome to Heroes!
I think the most likely culprit of the delay you're experiencing is the large quiz(zes). If you haven't already seen it, I'd recommend taking a look at this article on different troubleshooting tactics for a slow-performing quiz:
http://www.articulate.com/support/quizmaker09/kb/?p=1182
I think you'd see the most drastic results by breaking the larger quiz(zes) up into smaller quizzes, but there are several other ideas there to hopefully help you find some resolution. Let us know how it goes. Thanks!
Thanks or the reply. Unfortunately, the article is not helpful.
Let me re-state this is a problem which impacts a small group of users for a very large population but enough of a problem to be a significant support headache to a small support team. The stakeholders really are starting to second guess using Articulate as their content engine because it makes them look bad to their customers.
The largest quiz is 22 questions and surely this should be well within what Articulate can support. Looking at the logs the only thing we're seeing when the quiz / interaction gets stuck in spinner mode is not all the MP3 files in the quiz arrive. What is so frustrating is if the same workstation / user experiencing the problem then runs the Fiddler Web Debug proxy in the background, the screen that is locking works and loads instantly I might add.
Perhaps the issue here might need to be worded differenly as why would using Fiddler allow the course to work, eg allow the MP3s to arrive to the workstation for these exception users.
The course developer is going to take ALL the audio in the Quizmakers and Interaction as a workaround but this is addressing the sympton not the problem.
Hi Phil,
We can't prevent how others are configuring firewalls or blocking incoming requests. With that said...
...Although it would be ideal to push content to your end users without issues, it's not realistic to expect this; especially when you are catering to a varying degree of system specifications and security settings. The idea is to reduce the number of callbacks by streamlining a presentation to accomodate a larger group, or have a disaster recovery plan in place to handle the small number of users who might fall into this category of issues. Collecting the following information from these users can help isolate and/or identify issues:
- Browser they are using and version
- ISP or Internet speed
- Flash version (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15507.html)
- Connect type (wifi, LAN line or other)
Suggestions:
Create a primer or introduction slide listing system requirement to view the presentation and/or what to expect when progressing through. These requirements might include:
- Preferred LAN line connection over wifi or other wireless connection. This will greatly reduce disconnection issues.
- Soundcard. Needed for Engage interactions with Audio or the content will not advance.
- Time to dedicate themselves to the content.
Another suggestion:
While waiting at the pre-loader (spinning segmented circle), it's most likely they assumed the content had become unresponsive and disengaged from the content. It's important to instruct users who have a low bandwidth connection (slow Internet like dial-up) to wait for the pre-loader to complete. You could explain it's normal behavior and the presentation is simply loading the next portion of the presentation.
I hope you find these ideas helpful...
Thanks for your help. I am suspicous that there may be some intermediary app lke a firewall or intrusion detection app that is throttling the burst of media files the articulate lesson is asking for, however, that the use of a web debug proxy (fiddler) fixes the problem is unexplainable. The client is taking out the audio files in QuizMaker, but it defeats the purpose of audio in quizmaker.
A suggestion for the developers is to look at offering to the user a message after waiting for a suitable interval that a file has not arrived and to continue or abort the lesson. Troubleshooting this one was a challenge.
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