I am the web guy for a large TV station. Our site is cached by Akamai. Pages render perfectly in our testing environment (not cached) and on our "origin" page (again, not cached), but when they are viewed on our live environment (the cached site), they do not render exactly the same as how I coded them. Maybe it's a tiny bit of spacing, maybe it's a CSS element (backgrounds especially) not displaying, and worst of all, forget all about floating DIVs. It's insane how much table design I have to do because of the failure to float.
Does anyone else have experience with caching like this? Is there a tool I can use to see the changes in rendering?
There is no one I can go to for support, because the company doesn't believe the problem exists. Please assist if you can.
The site is built on a VB.Net backend that I do not have access to. I only have access to the front end.
I've been working on sites behind Akamai and can honestly say they don't mess with your code, so that's not the issue. It's more than likely one of the following:
You have a cache latency issue - You updated your html and css, and one of the two updated while the other is still cached by Akamai or using timestamps to increment dependent files. There are several solutions here including making sure to clear cache via Akamai's control panel as well as more programmatic ways of coding. Headers can also be used though not really a preferred way.
Absolute URL's - Relative url's are best when testing on multiple environments to ensure your pointing everything to the same environment.
This is definitely an environment issue not an Akamai issue.
Are stylesheets, Javascript files etc all loading correctly from Akamai?
Can you save a copy of a page retrieved directly from your "origin" server and a copy saved using Akamai, then use diff to look for changes?
And, most importantly, have you asked Akamai about it? It's not really a programming question :)
Download all files as static files from development and then from production. And use a tool like WinMerge to see the differences.
Also does this problem go away if you do CTRL-F5 to refresh the browser?
Perhaps Akamaia isn't seeing the updated versions of your CSS files that are <link />'d in your HTML code? It might be a good idea to embed a version number in the URL so that when you release an updated version of the HTML, it's always going to ask Akamai for a new version of the CSS as well (this applies to images as well I suppose).
Theoretically, Akamai should recognize updated caching headers that your web server sends but I've never worked at a job where we didn't have to have some counter-measures in place to make sure that we could force Akamai to refresh its cached version.
Related
I have a site where I am getting:
I had to do a full re-install where this previously all worked fine, and this is going to Azure. I re-imported my publish settings from Azure and see this. That looks good too so I assumed we were back to normal.
Except that the "Publish Succeeded" stuff, when I visit that actual URL I publish to (which I had to blur), none of my changes are there.
Any ideas?
I'm fully checked-in on the git branch and this runs fine locally.
From your comments I understand you're using FTP to make changes to your Azure project. That's not really the best way of deploying an application in 2020, but for this particular issue that you're facing it doesn't matter what method you use.
The most likely scenario is that when you visit the URL you are being given a cached version of your website.
That can happen for multiple reasons:
1) Your browser stored a cached version of the website
2) You are using a CDN (content delivery network) such as Cloudflare, which most often comes with an enabled cache feature that ensures your users will get your static pages lightning fast
3) Your web application implements one or more caching procedures
If none of those is the case (ie: you have tried using incognito mode, you don't use a CDN and you haven't implemented a caching strategy) then you might need to double-check you have pushed to the correct branch and that the commits contain your recent changes.
EDIT: if you actually have everything checked, including that your Git repo is properly synchronized, then it might be worth trying a different deployment method -- normally it shouldn't affect the end result, but there is the possibility that the Microsoft Azure platform has certain hidden bugs - this being one of them.
Have you thoroughly check the directories and stuff if its correct? most of the time issues like this are some minor errors like cache, wrong directories, and same output from previous files etc.
A friend has asked me to do some work on his existing site which was built in Rapidweaver. I'm on Windows, so is there another way I can access and edit his site?
The Rapidweaver project file is meant to be edited only in Rapidweaver, really. As far as I know, the only way around would be to use an HTML editor to modify the pages that are already in the server. However, I would not reccomend you to do it unless you are not going back to Rapidweaver anymore. Because changing the files in the server does not update your local Rapidweaver files. So, you could end up editing something in the server, then getting back to Rapidweaver and upload a "new" version that would not be completely up to date (the previous changes in the server version would be overriden by the older rapidweaver project).
For that kind of work, a CMS (Content Management System) is a more flexible way to work. Nowadays, one of the most common is Wordpress. It will require an inicial setup but after it is working it can be updated from anywhere via web browser, or even from an app in your iPhone. But it is not a Rapidweaver based sollution.
There are a couple CMS related plugins or stacks (Dropkick CMS, Armadillo, Easy CMS, Total CMS...) for Rapidweaver that could also be useful in this context. Once again, first you would need to buy a licence and to setup the website using one of those plugins or stacks. Only then you would be able to edit on the go.
A relative asked me to fixed a Joomla website (v2.5.16) who has been hacked last year, probably due to lack of update (is up to date now), unfortunately I have no information about this. The issue is that the front end take 2~ min to load. The administration is loading normally so whatever the issue is, it depend of the front end. I already disabled all modules one by one and switched the template with another one to make sure that thebug is not in template or plugins folders, without success.
I must add that the problem is "probably" more recent than the hack, according to this person. So maybe there was a script somewhere reaching a random server which may not work anymore.
PS : the website is on a shared hosting. I have the FTP access but no ssh.
I know that I don't give any details which can lead to resolve this, but I need more a method to track what can go wrong and where than a solution.
Thanks in advance,
We have written a lengthy post explaining why a website might be slow: http://www.itoctopus.com/20-questions-you-should-be-asking-yourself-if-your-joomla-website-is-slow
From the looks of it, it might that the website is still hacked. Try overwriting the Joomla files with a fresh Joomla install and see if that addresses the problem.
Solving this issue will probably involve some or all of the following:
updating Joomla and all third party extensions to the latest versions
checking for and fixing malicious files using http://myjoomla.com or
https://sucuri.net or similar
analysing the performance of the website using http://gtmetrix.com
(it's free) or similar to pinpoint and fix what is taking the most time to
load
If the website has been hacked, you may need to reset passwords etc once the malicious files have been removed. See https://joomla.stackexchange.com/a/180/120 for more information about securing the website once it is fixed.
I installed Typo3 Neos, Apache and MySQL in a Docker container. The initial page loads in about a second, which seems okay to me. But most css-, javascript- and font-files take extremely long to load, some over 20 seconds waiting time.
A chromium network timeline screenshot can be found on http://postimg.org/image/j3io3s0in/.
All files except the initial html exist as actual files. (I am not familiar enough with neos to say whether they are used, though.)
My apache config contains SetEnv FLOW_CONTEXT Production, and I grepped through the directory where neos is installed to make sure it is not overwritten anywhere.
I also used FLOW_CONTEXT=Production ./flow flow:cache:flush followed by FLOW_CONTEXT=Production ./flow flow:cache:warmup to restart the caches, and even after this and several page loads, the site stays the same.
Any help on how to bring this to adequate performance would be greatly appreciated.
- Simon Kohlmeyer
PS: This is different from Neos Performance in that NehalemWars problem is with the generated html, while mine are with all other files.
It's very unlikely to be related to Neos/Flow directly since what happens is that there is a symlink created for the static resources. So it's likely more related to the system environment and it's handling of symlinks or similar. Neos/Flow is never executed when fetched static resources at all and creates the symlinks if not already available when rendering the response.
This is related to my problem here:
Editing velocity template of Liferay changes not showing or takes a while
I've tried to investigate the caching problem and tried different things. Here's what I found out.
I just found out that my css is also delayed in showing the updates. I tweak my css file adding comment and testing it on my browser. Now just requesting it on the URL it will just give me an older version of the file. now if i put a query asking for version, (eg. mystyle.css?v2) it will pull the latest file and it records it. I can even see different version, eg. (mystyle.css?v1) or (mystyle.css?v2. I've cleaned my cache so it's definitely on the server side (i think).
Is there a way I can clear my cache?
Thank You!
you can activate Liferay's developer setting by including the properties that are in ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-developer.properties.
Explanation: Liferay minifies and caches CSS and Javascript - once this is done it will not examine those for changes. The developer settings will disable that.
However, you don't want this setting active in production as this will mean that you'll have to load dozens of files instead of very few combined+minified, well cached, files.
I assume you are using this for development, not in production.
If you're having these problems in production, you should rather work with a proper theme plugin and redeploy that.