3

I have a site where I'm using City Magazine Theme from ThemeForest / ThemesMania and the theme is failing (intermittently) to render completely and sometimes fails totally to connect. Great looking theme, but I must'a done something wrong here ...

  • This issue has been reproduced by Hostgator from multiple locations. Connections are solid. Speeds are good.

  • The site has been moved to local hosts, multiple servers in multiple locations and still gets the same results.

  • The site has been re-installed multiple times with the same results.

  • The site has been reviewed by Drupal Users groups in San Francisco and Baltimore ... same results.

  • It is not a connection problem as all other sites perform normally from the test servers and user locations.

  • Sadly, the themesmania guys are not responding ... At least not yet!

  • All engineers who have looked at this are scratching their heads ... and pointing at something to do with the theme.

  • Running on 6.x Drupal and all modules are up-to-date.

  • Anybody have clues as to why intermittent incomplete rendering would be occuring???

!! ** Great theme! Probably in wide distribution and successful, but something is out of whack in this picture.

/*** Comments/suggestions/clues are all greatly appreciated. *****/

-C-

cfusch
  • 729
  • 4
  • 7
  • What do you mean by "unable to connect" and "fails to render completely"? Are there any error messages? Can you provide screen shots or (even better) a link to a site experiencing this problem? Do you get the same results regardless of caching settings? Are there any javascript errors? Have you run the CSS through a CSS validator to check for bugs in the CSS? Have you checked the file permissions on the server for the theme files? – sheena_d Feb 03 '12 at 14:39
  • Thanks, Sheena_d! I'm still testing, but I believe this to be resolved. It seems that firefox under Ubuntu is the culprit. My partner is sitting next to me on the same connection and successfully gets the site to behave properly with firefox under windows. Opera and Chrome work on ubuntu and windows. Safari is also working properly. My guess is that the theme does not work for firefox under all conditions. – cfusch Feb 04 '12 at 15:39
  • In answer to your question, Sheena, try going from menu item to menu item quickly. As admin, saving theme configuration, modules, etc. the screen looses its color, i.e. no banner and some links remain. if clicking on the 'home' link firefox delivers its panel, "cannot connect' .. mgmar dot org. – cfusch Feb 04 '12 at 15:56
  • There are still many factors within your site that could be causing the issue. In my experience, if Firefox is having significant problems with a theme and the theme renders fine in Webkit-based browsers, it can usually be traced back to a syntax error in CSS or JS that is interpreted differently by Firefox versus Webkit. There are very few situations where anything that is coded correctly will work differently between Firefox and Webkit. – sheena_d Feb 04 '12 at 15:58
  • Sheena_d, thank you for your suggestions and I largely agree. The theme is well known (city_magazine from themeforest) and looking back, they did not list firefox as a compatible browser. (duh) Given that it seems to fail only under firefox on linux makes me feel a bit more comfortable AND my firefox is ready for an upgrade. If that doesn't work, then I resort to some CSS hacks which I don't cherish or convert to a different theme. (most visitors to the site are on windows or mac. Visitation profiles are not geeks like us on linux. ;-) – cfusch Feb 04 '12 at 16:28
  • SOLVED!! I moved the site to a VPS and off of the shared server. There have been no difficulties since the move. The former server had restrictions on number of concurrent processes and php_mem down to 64M. The VPS server has been set to 128M and 50 concurrent processes. VPS was the answer. – cfusch Feb 22 '12 at 13:10

2 Answers2

0

Very usual issue with themes. Open developer console in your browser and look for HTTP errors while trying to get page resources.

Theme creators sometimes put CSS, JS or images on external resources that are slow to respond or did not respond at all. I saw issues when theme trying to load JS file, that is on top of the page (that prevents page from loading).

Also theme creators like to use counters, your page trying to access some slow URL and behaves very strange. Just remove all external requests or make them local (if we talk about necessary resources).

Hope this helps.

Dmitry Shilyaev
  • 713
  • 4
  • 10
0

The issue was actually solved nearly five years ago, BUT thank you for your responses!

[SOLUTION] In my case it was not external calls to other URLs, but rather that I was running the Drupal site on a shared server, which is not a good idea. I moved to a VPS and the problem was immediately eliminated. More precisely, shared servers do not provide the level of PHP memory necessary to drupal PHP scripts. Yes, Drupal is just a bit piggish with resources ;-)

Thank you for your responses.

Carl

cfusch
  • 729
  • 4
  • 7