Troubleshooting Tips


Troubleshooting Tips

There are many possible causes of performance issues. The following troubleshooting guidelines can help identify some common causes of performance issues.

If there is a known issue with the Four51 software application, the Network Status page will be updated accordingly. We therefore recommend that with any performance issue, this page be checked before troubleshooting any further. This page can be found at: http://status.four51.com/. Better yet, you can subscribe to a variety of email and text alerts from this page.
 
If there are no known issues, this survey can initiate the troubleshooting process quickly on your end and will provide answers to many of the questions that a Four51 support resource will likely ask should a case be submitted.

Background

   1.   Identify when the issue started. Does this date/time correspond with any changes made to your infrastructure?
         a.   Firewall/Proxy server updates
         b.   New ISP
         c.   Many other possibilities
   2.   Identify the time range during which this issue occurs
         a.   Does the issue only occur during certain hours?
         b.   Does the issue always occur?
         c.   Does the issue occur sporadically?
   3.   Identify the scope of the issue
         a.   Does the issue only occur on one computer?
         b.   Does the issue occur on multiple computers on one network?
         c.   Does the issue occur on multiple networks (e.g. at home and at the office)?

Computer Specific Troubleshooting
  1. Restart the computer. Does the issue still occur?
  2. Clear out all temporary internet files/cache, cookies, and sessions in your browser. Does the issue still occur?
  3. Disable and shutdown all running programs except for a web browser. This includes anti-virus/firewall/anti-spyware software. Does the issue still occur?
  4. Try using a different browser. If you are using IE7 or IE8, install Firefox 3x, and vice versa. Does the issue still occurs

Network Specific Troubleshooting
  1. Run a traceroute to ‘www.four51.com’. You will notice that all requests time out after the gateway at Visi (our datacenter service provider) – this is normal and to be expected. Analyze the results of your traceroute, or send them to us for analysis. Asterisks, response times over 200ms, or response times that vary wildly may be indicative of an issue somewhere between your office and our datacenter.
  2. Look at http://www.internetpulse.net/ to see if there are any readily visible issues with the Internet backbone.
  3. Are there any firewalls or proxy servers that could be affecting your Internet traffic? Some common issues are:
    • Changing back and forth between HTTP and HTTPS modes. We can make changes on the Four51 side to test if this is an issue affecting your network.
    • Analysis of packed Javascript. Like many sites on the web, Four51 uses packed Javascript to keep the page size small. This may cause an issue with some security policies.
  4. What is the status of your network’s bandwidth?
    • What type of connection do you have?
    • Who is your ISP?
    • Are you able to determine your network’s bandwidth saturation/usage?

Four51 Application Specific Troubleshooting
  1. Does the issue occur when doing anything on the site, or does the issue only occur when performing a certain action? If only for a certain action, what is that action? Can you perform that action on a different product, user, category, report, etc without the issue occurring? Be sure to mention specifics if you contact Four51 Support.
  2. Use a plugin such as Firebug (for Firefox) that will show you the size of all elements on the page. What is the size of the page that you are having issues with? If the page size is greater than 300 KB, your page may be abnormally large:
    • Are there elements in your theme that are making the page size larger? Try viewing the same page with the default theme and compare sizes.
    • Are there multiple images that need to be loaded?
    • Is there a rendered image with a large file size that is being loaded?
    • Are the dynamic fly-out category menus enabled on the buyer interface? The contents of these menus are loaded entirely upon page load, and can increase the page size very quickly if there are a large number of categories.
    • Are you searching for something without narrowing down search criteria? Some reports may not be able to complete quickly enough if they are very large. Try narrowing your search criteria to see if that helps.
    • One known issue is with the LineItem Report. The Extended Price and Extended Cost columns were put in to make the report more convenient. If your report times out when including these columns, try calculating those values in your spreadsheet program instead.

Reference Materials: None

Related Articles: None

Labels: Troubleshooting, Issue, Network Issue, Slowness, Performance