Performance Issue Background
In late September and early October, the author server suddenly started having large periods of unavailability due to it using all available memory at peak periods of usage.
IT Services staff determined that the Content Finder portion of the application was running very slowly, and the lack of performance combined with people's attempts to reload apparently unrepsonsive pages were causing the application to run out of memory and essentially crash.
The Content Finder is the pane on the left of an editing page in author that allows the management and addition of media such as images.
IT Services staff addressed part of the issue, which has kept the author server from becoming entirely unresponsive, but some aspects of page loads and editing remain slow.
IT Services is working with the application vendor to address the root cause of the issue, but the investigation has been time consuming due to the very large size of the data and our need to keep the system available during the investigation, which limits the number of opportunities for some types of mitigation.
The Symptoms and what you can do
When opening a page in the AEM authoring environment for editing, the page has three somewhat independent elements:
- The Content Finder, which is the left side pane that contains images and documents that you can drag onto a web page as you are editing
- The main content area which displays your page preview and editing space for your actual web page layout and content
- The Sidekick which "floats" above your content page and contains the components and tools such as page properties, version control, page activation controls, etc.
The primary cause of slow page editing in Author at the moment is directly related to the slow loading of the Content Finder. Depending on how your web browser decides to load the editing environment page elements, the content finder could be loaded early in the page load cycle, or later on. If it is loaded early it may delay other elements of the page from loading and allowing you to edit the page. The Content Finder will load, but it may take up to a minute; refreshing the Content Finder does not help.
Unfortunately, you can't directly control the order that the elements load in your browser; however, if your editing task at a given time is primarily editing text and components on the page, and you will not be using the Content Finder, you do not need to wait for that section to load before you begin editing as long as the content page and sidekick have appeared.
You also can instruct AEM to NOT load the Content Finder if you know that you will not be using it in an editing session. It is a two-step process, but it can make page editing faster and more fluid in the current situation.
Disabling the Content Finder for a session
If you determine that you don't need the Content Finder to edit a page, you can disable the Content Finder by opening the page normally for editing, then modifying the URL to remove the "cf#" element, and then reloading the page. AEM Author will reload the page but will not open the Content Finder, and editing of the page will be less likely to be slow or delayed.
To disable the Content Finder when you are about to edit the page:
- Open the page for editing as usual (eg. by clicking on the page from AEM's WCM view, which opens it in a new window)
- As the page is opening, the URL of the page will be visible in your browser address bar. You do not have to wait for the page to complete loading
- In your address bar, your page address will look something like this: https://author.sfu.ca/cf#/content/sfu/yoursite/yourpage.html
- Remove the "cf#/" from the URL so that it looks like http://author.sfu.ca/content/sfu/yoursite/yourpage.html and hit enter/return on your keyboard. This should load the page again, but without the Content Finder on the left side.