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
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!
Thanks David. We've definitely isolated the issue and are currently testing putting a short timeout on the dorequest function. We'll post back a fix to moodle.org if we confirm it.
Ezra,
Good work on your end with troubleshooting this issue.
We're working around this by putting a 5 second timout in place.
Ezra,
Thanks for the tip. I'll try this from my end.
Thanks!! This worked out great.
Just a warning: IE7 doesn't support httpReq.timeout so we're going to rework this further.
Also planning to add a resubmission function so it keeps trying until it does succeed.
Ezra,
As discussed, you might want to bring this issue up with the Moodle community.
Yep, I posted my findings on moodle.org as well and asked one of the SCORM maintainers to take a look.
Posted updated code here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=164445#p768071
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.