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Longer video load times in discussions

James-Kocher

Hello! We've seen an significant increase in load times for Studio video responses in discussion boards. It can take up to 10 minutes or more to fully load one page of the discussion. In previous courses that have this assignment, it wasn't an issue at the time, but reviewing the pages now, we see the same issue. I'm currently at 180 Mbps download speeds. Is anyone else experiencing this or know a way to cut down load times? Thanks!

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adam_c_voyton

I've seen this issue before not with Studio videos, but I have seen it with Kaltura videos embedded in a way I suspect is pretty similar. Canvas used to have pagination for media-heavy pages, which significantly improved loading performance. Since that feature was removed, pages containing a large number of embedded videos can take much longer to load. Unfortunately, it's a frustrating limitation that we've noticed as well.

dbrace

Just to expand on what @adam_c_voyton said, yes, it is something that sometimes happens but it can also happen on a generic Canvas page with a lot of embedded videos from the native Canvas LMS, Canvas Studio, YouTube, or any other source that supports embedding. A similar experience can also happen on a public webpage. Unforunately, there is only so much that can be done.

One option specific to Canvas discussions is to have threads be collapsed by default. It is then possible to also decide if that setting is locked or not.

How do I edit or delete a discussion in a course?

-Doug

James-Kocher

@adam_c_voyton was this a recent change? The instructors are saying they didn't experience this in their summer courses.

James-Kocher

Collapsed by default is for the comments in response to the initial post, not the the posts themselves.

Jeff_F

We are also seeing this slowness - it is a huge barrier in the discussions. As for a workaround - asking students to share the public link in their post might be an option - depending of course on your policies.

As for a longer-term solution, I'd like to think that a media player specifically optimized for discussions would be helpful. For example, a player that does not start to load all the media content on page load. I assume this is what is happening as after opening a discussion that is full of Studio videos, we've seen student computers using 1-4GB RAM for Canvas alone. Most were around 2 GB.

Edit - this happened to me at home as well and I have a dedicated 10 Gbps fiber connection. It isn't my download speed…

James-Kocher

I have a ticket in. Of course L1 asked "what troubleshooting steps did you take, as we're not experiencing this issue. Please send a screen recording of the behavior."

I hope they like Pink Floyd playing in the background while the video shows nothing loading for 2 minutes 🤣

adam_c_voyton

As a technician that processes lots of tickets, I wish users would send me videos to demonstrate technical issues with Pink Floyd in the background. Shine on you crazy diamond!

James-Kocher

My reasoning was two-fold. First, I wanted a live soundtrack to show the video wasn't just stuck and that the Studio videos weren't loading. Second, it was just funny. I used "Brain Damaged," for some unknown reason (reminder I was dealing with L1, so…. 🤣)

James-Kocher

I can't share the video I made for them, since there are student names, but here's one I sent to support when I told them I was getting an unauthorized error when launching Impact from my admin dashboard in Canvas.

https://app.screencast.com/LllKIEGZt5pCe

Akos Farago

@James-Kocher @adam_c_voyton @Jeff_F @dbrace

Hey! Thank you for reporting this. While I am trying to get this sorted, can someone confirm if any of you submitted a support case for this? And if not, could you submit one?

That would speed up the process a lot.

Thank you!

dbrace

Hi @Akos Farago,

@James-Kocher said that they did:

-Doug

https://community.instructure.com/en/discussion/comment/1261847#Comment_1261847

James-Kocher

@Akos Farago

It's case #15218094. Thanks!

James

Akos Farago

Just sharing that we identified the issue and the right teams will be soon working on it. I'll provide an ETA here when I get to share one.

In the meantime please let me know if you experience slow loading (and high data consumption) in resources other than Discussions too.

James-Kocher

Thanks!

Michael_17

@Akos Farago Unsure if this is related, but I opened a case 11961746 last year with support for an issue loading discussions with high utilization of Studio Videos maxing memory in browsers. We found users' browsers were trying to load all of the videos at once which would require anywhere from 2-4GB of memory to view. This would cause some user's to be unable to view the page as it would error out. Support provided the following response:

"This is Brandon with L2 support. I understand that you are reporting that when a discussion includes many embedded studio videos, it will cause issues for students attempting to view them. This behavior has been brought up to our team before, and they've informed us that at this time this would be expected given how many videos are being displayed on one page. The system is required to load that many items, which causes too much strain on the browser which will cause issues while viewing those pages. As these are limitations to the amount of data browser can handle, errors like this with this many embedded videos would be expected at this time. To avoid this, we'd suggest splitting up these discussions into two parts to avoid having this many videos embedded onto one item, or instead have users post links to the videos rather then embedding the direct videos themselves.

We do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, if you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out at any time."

My case was from March of 2025, so I don't know if re-opening the case would help. I can confirm though that after checking this morning, we are still seeing issues with discussions loading threads if several students have embedded Studio Videos in their posts.

Akos Farago

@Michael_17 thank you for the additional context on this. No need to re-open the case at this point.

Nancy_Webb_CCSF

Thanks Akos. One symptom is in student and teacher access reports, any of them that visit a discussion page with lots of student videos shows many views of Studio, over a 100 is common even if just spent 2 minutes viewing the discussion. One teacher shows over 8000 Studio views in a class, and it's open just over a week! Students have large numbers too. My admin page views shows many videos as viewed within the same minute, not really possible. Pages of them.