I have a very odd and very intermittent problem on a new Drupal site that seems to only occur with IE8. I'm hoping someone has some suggestions on some things that may be causing this.
What's happening is that about 1-5% of page requests anywhere on our site will not completely download to the browser when it's IE 8. By pages not completely downloading I mean that the browser displays a blank white screen and if you do a view source you see the first 20-50 lines of HTML for the page and then nothing. If you hit refresh in the browser the page will properly load almost every time.
We have not been able to reproduce the problem in any other browser or when IE8 is in Compatibility mode.
I also have not been able to reproduce the problem at all with IE 8 in my local dev environment.
This problem seems to occur regardless if the user is an anonymous user or an authenticated user (or even user 1).
The site is hosted on a dedicated Red Hat server running Apache 2.2.3 and PHP 5.2.11.
Under Drupal's Performance options, we have the following enabled:
-Cache mode: normal
-Min cache lifetime: 15 min
-Page compression: Enabled
-Block cache: Enabled
-Optimize CSS: Enabled
-Optimize JS: Enabled
I've checked the apache error logs and haven't found any errors of interest and none from my IP around the date/time that I have reproduced the error.
Anyone have any ideas on what may be causing this?
Thanks in advance.
Comments
May be due to your browser or add-ons
I suspect that this is due to your browser or add-ons.
My browser tends to stop loading somewhere around line 64. By loading another website in another window or tab, or by pressing F5 (refresh), the "hanging" Drupal site will load immediately. I realised that disabling add-ons reduces the number of such incidents.
Try disabling add-ons. Do not disable security add-ons.
Or, try using another version of the browser.
Thanks for the
Thanks for the suggestion.
I'm testing with a default/clean install of IE in a Virtual Machine and can reproduce the problem fairly regularly. I did try disabling the only add-ons that were installed (Flash and Java), but that didn't resolve the problem.
I've also finally been able to reproduce the error consistently in my development environment so it doesn't seem to be something specific to the live site hosting environment.
Thanks,
Shawn
You are not alone
Try disabling most add-ons. Do not disable security add-ons. For best results, do not disable XML DOM Document, & Discuss.
Other possibilities:
Internet connection / ISP problem
Favicon file/path/filename problem
You are not alone
http://drupal.org/node/610974
Here is what I found to be
Here is what I found to be the cause of the error in my specific case.
It turned out to be related to the amount of data in the Drupal.settings javascript object. The root of the problem was that a custom sidebar block was inserting a massive data structure into the Drupal.settings object.
Everything seems to be resolved now that I rewrote the data storage mechanism to eliminate unused information and to shorten the name of the remaining fields.
The javascript debugger in IE8 was also very little help in tracking down this issue. The main Javascript error reported by IE in this case was:
But if you step through the javascript in the page, you would sometimes get errors about objects in the Drupal.settings collection being null when they should have a value (that was my main clue).
So the lesson learned here is to limit how much data gets stuffed into the Drupal.settings object. :-)
Thanks,
Shawn
scripts
I was having similar issues with IE8 only..
Moving the scripts from the header to the bottom of the page.tpl.php file in the theme folder for pages that use a lot of javascript fixed the problem and increased performance.