I have had trouble accessing LimeSurvey for the past two months. Before that it worked well for two years.

It seems like initial requests to access any survey, or the login screen, time out. If I wait a minute and try again, it works. This is the case even if I clear my browser cache, so I don't think it's a cache issue. It seems like LimeSurvey needs to be "activated" before coming to life. I don't know how else to describe it. I have attached two screenshots from Google Page Insights taken less than one minute apart.

I have contacted my web hosting company. My domain works great. The server load is normal and access times to other pages are fast. The issue seems to be specifically with accessing LimeSurvey.

Does anyone have any suggestions or possible fixes? Are there server issues that may be at fault?

Thank you!

rjm972 wrote: I have had trouble accessing LimeSurvey for the past two months. Before that it worked well for two years.

What kind of hosting do you use.

I would first try to find out, what happend two months ago with the hosting environment.
Perhaps PHP version was changed. Or Serverconfiguration was changed?

Limesurvey is writing big sessionfiles (way too big), but nobody seems to use Limesurvey with many respondents per hour on a limited session partition. So I haven't seen any complaint here about these big sessions files.

This sessionfile is written somewhere depending on the settings of php.
I would ask the provider of your server about how php sessions are handled. Where are the session files stored. How long are they stored. That could be a bottleneck.

But hard to tell without any hard facts about the setup and the hosting company.

Thank you for your reply! I have contacted my web hosting company and provided them with the information you sent. I'll post back if there's any progress.

Hi,

First : try wth a very little survey without Expression Manager inside (just 2 question).

A big survey make a lot of time to construct, we improve this in a future relase (ls3).

Thank you. I tried your suggestion but it made no difference.

Even just logging into LimeSurvey is slow at first. It's like the entire system is in sleep mode and must wake up. After it wakes up, it's fast.

My webhosting company increased PHP limits including session variables and also enabled Gzip compression. This increased the speed after the initial access problem. However, when first accessing LimeSurvey in any way after 1-2 hours, the request times out.

Any other suggestions that I can send to my webhosting company? Or something that I can do?

Thank you!

rjm972 wrote: This increased the speed after the initial access problem. However, when first accessing LimeSurvey in any way after 1-2 hours, the request times out.

Without infos about the hosting package and e.g. a phpinfo dump I cannot give any direct advise.

I would install a different php application like wordpress or joomla to see if these kind of "startup problems" are the same with these tools. These apps are better in terms of initial session files.

Did you try if the problem exists from different internet connections.

I had such a problem (as you described) with a different application on a server across the atlantic.
It existed only for certain ISP-connection with certain routings. I wasn't able to pinpoint the issue. I just asked the hosting provider to move these sites to a different server. I still think it had something to do with routing and resolving IPs. If the webserver is set to resolve IPs of users back to hostnames an additional load and lag is added in the first contact. After a few hours the IP DNS resolving has to be repeated sind the dns cache was empytied. That isn't releated to Limesurvey and should occur with every application.