Cumulus Support

Asked on behalf of Michael Lawler (user mdlawler) who can't use this forum:

As the title suggests, Michael is having problems with the display of data on his website being intermittent. He says this:

I'm using Edge Canary, but it happens with the regular version of Edge also. As you can see the data stops displaying after the rain data and the Cumulusmx version displays as a web tag. If I go to http://lawlers.us/weather and then use f5 or control-f5 I can get it to do this and then the next refresh it will probably display correctly and then the next refresh or two it will mess up again.

Screen shot of this behaviour: I tried accessing Michael's site using Edge (and Chrome also) and couldn't replicate this behaviour. He then asks:

Perhaps this is some type of timing problem that only happens when the server and browser are on the same machine and things are super fast. Could you post this to the forum and see if Neil has any ideas?

I also have this issue and have to refresh the browser to show all the data. I use Edge as my browser. For me, it only started happening after I started using Google Drive Sync. Haven't tried turning it off to see if this resolves the issue.

Regards,
Trevor

I also see this using Edge but not on Firefox or Safari. The page refreshes itself on Edge at the next update period. I also run my web server and CumulusMX software on the same system - RPi 4

is there any type of cache being used in php? like Zend OPcache or something similar?

or even Leverage browser caching.

I noticed no compression is being used or http/2 protocols on that site as well.

This is just the default website - no PHP.

I've been loading that page maybe a hundred times in Edge and did not see the issue!

The data is refreshed once a minute, is the websitedata.json file uploaded once a minute as well?

Does the upload use the FTP Rename option? If not there is a longer window when the file will be partially written to on update and possibly sent by the web site - however if the file was incomplete you would expect the JSON parser to fail.

I generally only see it happen on the initial page load. Subsequent refreshes don't seem to have an issue. It can also happen when moving to a different page on the website but, again, a refresh will fix the issue.

I don't use CMX's built-in FTP functionality. I use a free web hosting service and my account gets blocked if I do. Instead, I upload the websitedata.json file every 2 minutes with LFTP via a Cron job. All other required files are done every 15 minutes.

I also have a local webserver installation visible inside my network which processes the websitedata.json file every minute using the Extra Web Files. This installation allows me to use SQL database as that is not available on the free service.

The issue of the page not fully loading happens on both the internal and external website which points to the issue being with the browser rather than anything else.

Regards,
Trevor

flort wrote: ↑Sat 25 Jun 2022 12:35 am I generally only see it happen on the initial page load. Subsequent refreshes don't seem to have an issue. It can also happen when moving to a different page on the website but, again, a refresh will fix the issue.

Right, I'll try again...

OK, I have found the problem and have a solution, I think.

Care to try this new version of the setpagedata script for me?

Hi Mark,

I've tried the new script but am still experiencing the issue.

Regards,
Trevor

Did you flush your browser cache - or Ctrl-F5 the page to ensure you pick up the new version of the script?

No I didn't. I was checking it over several hours and everything was looking good but then it had a failure so I thought there was still an issue. I've now cleared the cache so we'll wait and see if there is a reoccurrence.

Regards,
Trevor

Hi Mark,

I haven't had any further issues with this using the new script so looks like it has worked.

Regards,
Trevor

Great thanks, I'll incorporate the changes in the next release.