SitePal slow or no load

Aleksandra -

Thanks for reporting this.
It is surprising - given that our playback is accelerated by the global Akamai network, and delivered off of their servers for best performance worldwide.

Can you please post a link to your page where the character loads?

Does the problem happen more frequently at a specific time of day?

Let me know,
Gil

Thanks Gil.
My website is at: VideoInterviewPractice.com. You will have to sign up, but, it's totally free, to see the character. Just hit 'Practice' when you sign in.
It's not at a specific time of day. New users are always getting this slow time load.
For me it happens 50% of the time. I'm including an image if it helps. It's just of the loading logo.

Thanks for the fast reply!

Best,
Aleks

Aleksandra -
Thanks for the additional information. We are looking at this, just wanted to let you know. We've added logging to system portions to better understand what's going on (as we do not see the problem).
It may take some time to get to the bottom of this. Thanks for your patience.
Regards
Gil

Thank you so much!
Looking forward to what you find.

I am having the same problem at www.activehistory.co.uk. I am having to disable the sitepal feature until this problem is solved. Is there a way I could embed sitepal only after the rest of the page has loaded using an "onload()" script? Having the javascript having to load synchronously is a real pain...

I'm still having this problem.

You can take a look at it at https://VideoInterviewPractice.com and click on the 'Quick Try' button.

It is an intermittent problem, and, telling me that you 'don't see the issue on your end' is not a solution. That's just poor customer service and a brush off.

Some of my customers are reporting that their sitePal is not loading.

Aleksandra -
We're looking into it. Will advise.
Regards,
Gil

Thanks, Gil!

Aleksandra -

Is https necessary in your implementation?

Our current implementation for https is slower to load than http. This is probably the cause. Let me know if you can get away with using http. If not, we will update our implementation, but this will take some time to do.

Regards
Gil

Gil,

Yes. Https is necessary for me.
Thank you for taking a look at this issue.

For anyone that's looking for a workaround to this solution, what I did is set a timeout in javascript to check whether sitepal has been loaded within one second. (you can set a flag when it has been loaded in the sitepal loaded event.. like so

function vh_sceneLoaded()
{
sitePalLoaded = true;
}

after a second, i check whether sitePalLoded is true and if not, i re-add sitepal to my dom and start the timeout function again. this guarantees that your user wont have to re-load the page.

let me know if you need help on this solution.

Best,
Aleks

Aleksandra -
Thanks for providing this information.

fyi - the reason for the longer load time is that http Scenes are accelerated via the Akamai CDN, whereas https Scenes are not. This difference is due to a historic lapse on our part - and should definitely be corrected.

This has been added to the R&D task list though I don't have a firm timeline.
Gil

Great! Thank you, Gil.

Aleksandra -

This issue has been addressed.
HTTPS embedded Scenes should now load and perform similarly to HTTP Scenes.
Please review your pages & let me know if you are still seeing a problem.

Also - as a general rule it is worth noting that "recently updated Scenes" are automatically "unaccelarated" for a period of up to 24 hours after being updated. This means that when a Scene is updated (i.e. the Avatar or audio is modified), that Scene will not be delivered from the CDN, until all previous copies of the Scene have been "purged" from the CDN. This is done to ensure that the correct version of the Scene is always displayed.
The bottom line is - if you are looking at a Scene that was most recently updated over 24 hours ago, that Scene should perform optimally.

Regards.
Gil

Gil,

Great! Thank you for the update.
Makes total sense with the 24hr CDN thing. Thank you for explaining.

Best,
Aleksandra