Articulate SCORM Package Freezes on Load using IE8 in Moodle

May 03, 2011

The issue happens intermittently with Moodle 1.9 branch (latest stable), IE8, Flash. I'd estimate 10% of the time.

The package is launched and begins to load files. Many many files load  and then at some point the browser freezes.

Running a tcp packet capture during this time I can see that the browser is in a zero window state. The server continues to probe to see if the window is available. Consistently, 5 minutes later, the connection times out and the browser re-opens the window and connections resume. The timeouts happen with different files each time so I do not believe it's related to a bad file.

It appears to be trigger by the function LMSCommit. Here is what it looks like in the debug log (note the 5 minute difference in call and return).

166:Wed May 4 01:35:39 UTC+0100 2011 - Calling LMSCommit

167:Wed May 4 01:40:40 UTC+0100 2011 - strResult=false

We've tried making many changes on the server and retesting including:

  • Testing on different servers to rule out a firewall issue.
  • KeepAlive on and off
  • Turning compression off
  • Changing server timeouts
  • Different moodle installs and themes

 This issue has been documented in several places, include these posts:

http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/1144/4603.aspx

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=164445

http://www.articulate.com/forums/70678-post23.html

We've contacted Articulate about it via our client and although they are very polite and willing to listen and examine the package, they regard this as an LMS issue and have not provided further assistance. The package played without freezing on cloud.scorm.com.

I suspect there is a problem with Flash, IE and JavaScript and how they handle multiple http requests. Somehow this is triggered by Moodle's file delivery or the server configuration. Perhaps this is a race condition or Flash and IE and JavaScript together make more requests than IE can handle?

A log file of SCORM debug is attached. Next steps are to try to reproduce this with a non-SCORM Articulate course.

10 Replies
David Burton

Ezra,

As noted in the case I helped you with, this issue appears to be with Moodle and how it communicates across multiple IE8 browser windows. When setting the content to open/launch in the same browser window (Moodle setting), this appears to work around this issue.

To reiterate, during my SCORM TestTrack testing I could not reproduce this issue using any browser. I could only reproduce the issue when using IE8 with Moodle where the content was set to open in a separate window.

I hope this helps!

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