Site admin is very slow

[tractorboy]

The admin side of my site http://www.williscalibra.com/ is very slow. Some pages take a minute or more to load, such as saving a page in Content Manager, or saving a template.
The site uses CMSM 2.2.7 and PHP 5.6 so I’ve upgraded to 2.2.16 and PHP 8 on a copy of the site at http://cal.webu.org.uk/ and it’s made no difference.
There are no PHP errors, and none of the tables in the database are unduly large.
Any ideas anyone?

[DIGI3]

Some hosts severely limit the number of processes or PIDs, which can cause this. If you have cPanel or similar, have a look at the statistics there. If they limit it to something really low like 20, then you may need to upgrade your hosting package or find a better host.

[tractorboy]

Thanks, I'll contact the hosting company.

[johnboyuk1]

Hi tractorboy - which host are you on? I'm also having a similar issue!

[johnboyuk1]

The hosts have been looking into this but have offered no solution thus far, they say other CMS's are working fine on their platform, theyve indicated that they

...will likely need some input from the CMS madesimple Dev/support team to locate why the site is timing out, specifically when loading these 2 files:

cmsmadesimple/admin/moduleinterface.php
cmsmadesimple/admin/cms_js_setup.php

Unfortunately they load alot of other modules so it's currently not possible for to state why, but hopefully we may be able to point to where in the CMS what its attempting to load, and causing the time out.

So reaching out to the dev team for any ideas!

[Jo Morg]

Typically, but not exclusively, this issues are related with poorly configured server antivirus which may find some false positives in some code patterns, file names or behaviors and try to prevent its execution. It's usually time consuming to dig in and debug what it may possibly be the cause behind it, so everybody tries to blame everybody else. Now, although it's of no particular comfort for those having this issue, I'd like to see them explain why CMSMS works fine on 99.99% of the other hosts before they point the finger to it.
Having said that, what I may offer is trying to figure out what may be the issue on that server, but you'd have to PM me, to see when I can schedule something like that. I'm already swamped as it is, so I won't be able to commit to a particular time frame.

[johnboyuk1]

Thanks Jo

Ive also received the following info from them which may shed some further light on where the issue is ...

We've not made any changes to the PID limits or process limits, I have already checked that (if we had, that would have broken every other CMS's).

I really need to know what the site is doing during loading those 2 files:

cmsmadesimple/admin/moduleinterface.php
cmsmadesimple/admin/cms_js_setup.php

the site gets "stuck" for exactly 30 seconds during "cms_js_setup.php", and exactly 60 seconds for "moduleinterface.php" each time that it attempts to load, or send data, on those pages. Due to the timings being identical between my installation and your installation, its very likely that the site is doing "something" that it can't completed, for example it might be making a http request which is timing out (for whatever reason).

As such the site waits until the PHP forces it to complete, exactly 30 seconds afterward, and then continues to load the site as normal.

[Jo Morg]

Mmmm.... that smells like a ModSecurity issue. Both files have to include the same CMSMS libraries for the backend so they behave in a very similar way up until a certain point. One of the things they have to handle is the security key or token to certify the session and the user. Then they include backend needed libraries and diverge from that point. So... It really looks like a ModSecurity (or other firewall) rule that is interfering with it.