Help! Slooooooooow publishing

[bobolech]

When I edit and publish a file with Contribute 3.1, the publish step takes
several seconds. But when a colleague at another office edits and publishes a
single file, the publish step takes almost 8 minutes. My colleague is in a
remote office and we use FTP as the xfer mechanism, so at first I suspected an
FTP/networking issue, but after looking at the debug files produced in the
ct3netperformancelog folder, I'm not so sure, so I'm looking for help.

I found two records in the debug file that had timestamps 8 minutes apart, so
this must be where the problem is. Interestingly, the operations appear not to
be FTP xfers, but local operations -- deletions of local temporary files.
Below, I've pasted and reformatted the two debug records with the timestamps
separated by 8 minutes. Notice that the second operation results in a
RESOURCE_DOESNT_EXIST error while trying to delete a local template-related
file.

We would like to roll out Contribute to about twenty remote offices, but
8-minute publishing times just won't cut it. We're dead in the water until we
can solve this.

Thanks in advance.

REC#: 144
DATE: 3/9/2006 11:08
USER: pk
SYST: netio/LAN
OPER: DeleteFile
NERR: 0
PERR: 0
RERR: 0
DUR : 0.0009
ROOT: file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/pk/
PATH: /C|.../Contribute 3/Sites/Site2/solutions/hvac/index.htm.LCK

REC#: 145
DATE: 3/9/2006 11:16 <--- 8 minutes after the previous operation
USER: pk
SYST: netio/LAN
OPER: DeleteFile
NERR: RESOURCE_DOESNT_EXIST
PERR: 3
RERR: 3
DUR : 0.0002
ROOT: file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/pk/
PATH: /C|.../Contribute 3/Sites/Site2/Templates/_notes/
application-hp.dwt.mno

[jeremy_p]

This sounds EXACTLY like the problem that we are experiancing. I just found out
about the logging trick and am running a test now. Interestingly though, one of
our remote users has never had a problem and one of them does SOMETIMES. We
thought we had the problem solved so we rolled it out to a few more people at
the main location and it took about an hour to connect to the site the first
time. Now on my local system and on one right next to me it takes about 20
mintues after hitting the edit button before the page presents itself as ready
to work on. Hitting the publish button takes seconds. Keep in mind that these 2
systems where working in seconds just last week.

I will post more when I have data from the log file to back up my claims.

[bobolech]

After running many, many more tests (damn, this product is getting expensive!)
we think we've determined that the long delays are happening during the
ntPublish step. Here's a sample line from the debug file, which shows that the
ntPublish event eventually succeeds after 517 seconds:

231 3/22/2006 11:07:31
AM pk action/end ntPublish 0 0 0 517.7288 [url]http://www.oursite.com/solutions/sales[/url]
/index.htm -

It probably has something to do with a timeout issue somewhere between the
client and server since the page always eventually gets published.

What concerns me are some threads in these forums that refer to an ongoing
issue with Contribute where it opens lots of FTP connections and doesn't close
them (it lets them time out) so you either die with an inability to create
another connection (since you've used up your number of connections allowed for
a user/ip address) or you seemingly hang until one or more of the un-used
connections times out and then becomes available to you.

[bobolech]

After countless hours of troubleshooting, searching the user forums, and
debugging, we found the solution that works for us.

Despite the fact that nobody in our company uses IE for web browsing, we
discovered that in order for Contribute to work correctly, a web proxy server
must be explicitly defined within Internet Explorer for each user of
Contribute. Contribute will not be able to publish drafts correctly unless you
configure IE to bypass the automatic web proxy server configuration script that
comes configured with all browsers installed for employees of our company.

If we do not explicitly define a web proxy server within IE, a publish action
will appear to hang Contribute until Contribute finally returns after almost 8
minutes. Contribute never reports that the page was published, but if we check
on the server after the wait, the page is always published. Most of our users
who have experienced this give up after only a few minutes and quit Contribute,
not knowing that if they waited out the 8 minutes the page would be published
and Contribute would return.

When we define the web proxy server within IE, the publish action always works
like a charm.

[Howard Heflin]

bobolech wrote:

> After countless hours of troubleshooting, searching the user forums, and
> debugging, we found the solution that works for us.
>
> Despite the fact that nobody in our company uses IE for web browsing, we
> discovered that in order for Contribute to work correctly, a web proxy server
> must be explicitly defined within Internet Explorer for each user of
> Contribute. Contribute will not be able to publish drafts correctly unless you
> configure IE to bypass the automatic web proxy server configuration script that
> comes configured with all browsers installed for employees of our company.
>
> If we do not explicitly define a web proxy server within IE, a publish action
> will appear to hang Contribute until Contribute finally returns after almost 8
> minutes. Contribute never reports that the page was published, but if we check
> on the server after the wait, the page is always published. Most of our users
> who have experienced this give up after only a few minutes and quit Contribute,
> not knowing that if they waited out the 8 minutes the page would be published
> and Contribute would return.
>
> When we define the web proxy server within IE, the publish action always works
> like a charm.
>
>
>
>

Have you reported the issue to Adobe's Contribute development team?

--

Howard H. Heflin
[email]NOSPAM_HHHeflin@netscapeNOSPAM.net[/email]
The usual removals are required to reply.

Stop SPAM !!!!

[abna]

Can you tell me how to do the proxy thing?

[stockholmsyndrome]

Look at the Solution section of this
[url]http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=kb400142[/url]

For MS Internet Explorer go to Tools>Internet Options>Connections>LAN
settings> Do not check the boxes for automatic configuration.

For Mozilla Firefox go to Tools>Options>Network>Settings>Do not enable the
Auto-detect proxy settings for this network. Instead choose either Direct
connection to the Internet or Manual proxy configuration.

[abna]

Well, it was worth a shot, but changing the proxy settings didn't work for us. It was still as slow as ever.