Discussion Forums Have Become Intolerably Slow. Anybody else having this issue?

Question

I have no idea why Canvas discussion pages have become as slow as they have, but they now hair-tearing, infuriatingly, sluggish.

I must sometimes wait nearly a full minute after hitting the "reply" button for it to register, and then wait that long again to be able to start typing.  Then, I often have to wait that long again in the middle of a draft for Canvas to catch up with the apparently epic amounts of processing power it takes to accept a paragraph or two of plain text.

And woe unto the instructor who wishes to write several such paragraphs, or include an image or table.

Every semester the speed issue worse.

Additional Note: This slow down is magnified in courses where students tend to use special mathematical or LaTeX symbols in logic.  And they do this more and more as they tend to get help with from GPT which often outputs in LaTeX.  But the issue is still intolerable even in courses courses where students have no reason to use such symbols.  For the courses where they do the forums practically break.

What does not work:

* The suggestion of collapsing the threads does not work for me.  I need to see what I have responded to previously, and also opening and closing each thread isn't fast either.  I
* It is not an issue of computing power on my end.  I have this issue even on a fast machine.  "Buy a faster computer" is not a solution.
* Turning off all Chrome extensions does precisely nothing (or at least nothing measurable) to improve  responsiveness.
* It is not a connectivity issue.  This happens from any location/ISP and other websites containing just as much information do not choke in this way.

My post-rant questions:

* As a stop-gap until this urgent issue is fixed could Canvas allow us to set how many posts per page please?  (I need to set  it to like 1/4th of what it allows now for it to have a chance of being tolerable.)* I have been told that this is impossible on our end.  Can Canvas either provide this functionality or unlock it so that instructors can change this in settings?

* Can Canvas allow us to turn of LaTeX and math interpretations (and anything else) that slows discussions forums which do not need that functionality down?

Importance:
This is not a small issue.  Discussion forums are a core part of Canvas functionality.

I was one of the people to pushed for the use of Canvas over Blackboard at our school when we adopted it, and I am seriously regretting that choice.

It is as if usability of faculty and students is not even a consideration over the promotion "cool" things such as integrating AI nobody asked for, or new quizzes that are not neither fully accessible nor have enough benefits to justify prioritizing them over basic quality of life and usability issues.

I'm sorry for this to come off as so vehement, but I have heard that others have been making this complaint and are screaming into the void.

If anybody has any solutions, please let me know.  If anybody has the ear of Canvas developers, please help promote this as an absolutely critical issue.

adam_c_voyton · Answer

I'm going to make your Friday - just email support@instructure.com. Albeit, if your organization doesn't pay for a certain level of their tech support add-on service, the tickets would be escalated to someone on your team that has Admin Console access. You can also just open up a ticket in Admin Console directly instead of using the email address. It can be challenging to get a ticket escalated sometimes, as they're going to want lots of details - URL of impacted course so they can try to replicate the issue, screencast of you having the issue, information on how long exactly the loads are taking, your network speed, sometimes they've asked us for Network console logs which you'd want to check with your internal IT on how much of those logs you're authorized to share. Best of luck!

fcurry1 · Answer

The team at my institution could not help because this is a Canvas issue.

How do I open up a ticket with Instructure itself?  The Canvas help button gives information for my institution and does not open a ticket in Instructure.

The Instructure home page does not have a clear way to open a ticket.  The closet thing I could find to a location to get help was "ask our community."  The Support FAQ was useless and there was no way to open up a ticket that I could see at the bottom of it.

It is almost as if they don't want to be bothered and prefer to farm out support to the community rather than provide it themselves.

If you know how I can actually raise a ticket with them, I would love to be able to do so.

I have searched around online for how to submit a ticket directly, and from what I read it is impossible for me to do so directly.  I would love to be wrong about that.

adam_c_voyton · Answer

I'd recommend opening a ticket, checking your network speed, and maybe open up the browser's console to see the various API calls running in real time.  This could help you detect any abnormalities.