WeBWorK Problems

OPL Problems Do Not Render Outside University Network

OPL Problems Do Not Render Outside University Network

by Harshal Patel -
Number of replies: 4

Hi,

We recently configured Webwork 2.17 from scratch, and imported courses from the 2.15 version. We moved 2.17 version behind our NGINX proxy. Instructors noticed that the problems are not rendering well when accessed through Library Browser or Homework Set Editor on their personal devices (devices that are not issued by the university). There are no error messages coming up, problems either don’t load at all or they load very slowly. Screenshot attached. All the problems render slowly and fail to render images and Math Jax.

Problem mages Do not Load

This issue does not occur when they access the same problems through their university laptop. Can you assist if something needs to be changed in the site configuration to fix this?

Thanks,

Harshal

In reply to Harshal Patel

Re: OPL Problems Do Not Render Outside University Network

by Danny Glin -

Check that $server_root_url is set to the public address of your server (in your case this should probably be the proxy server).

If that isn't the issue, then check the browser's error log to see what it tells you about what's going on with off-campus connections.

In reply to Danny Glin

Re: OPL Problems Do Not Render Outside University Network

by Harshal Patel -
Hi Danny,

Thank you for the suggestion. I changed the $server_root_url to the public server. I gave it 10 days before replying here. They are now loading better outside the network but now within the network, problems render slow. Is there a way to fix this?

Thanks,
Harshal
In reply to Harshal Patel

Re: OPL Problems Do Not Render Outside University Network

by Danny Glin -

Do you see any errors or messages in the browser's console when accessing problems from on campus?

In reply to Danny Glin

Re: OPL Problems Do Not Render Outside University Network

by Harshal Patel -
Hi Danny,

Thanks for getting back. There aren't any error or messages as such. Firefox displayed these warning messages:

  • Cookie “TS016991b1” does not have a proper “SameSite” attribute value. Soon, cookies without the “SameSite” attribute or with an invalid value will be treated as “Lax”. This means that the cookie will no longer be sent in third-party contexts. If your application depends on this cookie being available in such contexts, please add the “SameSite=None“ attribute to it. To know more about the “SameSite“ attribute, read https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Set-Cookie/SameSite
  • This site appears to use a scroll-linked positioning effect. This may not work well with asynchronous panning; see https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/scroll-linked_effects.html for further details and to join the discussion on related tools and features!
None of them seems to be related. I was monitoring the memory usage of the server when I load the problems in the Library Browser, it did not go unusually high. I have set the MaxRequestWorkers value to 40 since I have 8 GB RAM. Should I change this value?

Also, the test instance, which is locally hosted and is not behind our proxy, is also rendering the problems a bit slow. It looks like this issue has nothing to do with moving the site behind our NGINX proxy.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Thank you,
Harshal