Symptom

Loading EditLive! takes 5 minutes or more. The loading progress indicator may progress but extremely slowly or the browser may appear to have hung.

Cause

The delay in loading is triggered when the editlivejava.jar file is served without a “Last-Modified” HTTP header, preventing the Java plugin from caching the jar. Due to this, every time a new class is initialized the entire jar file is downloaded again. Even on fast networks or local access this causes substantial delays.

In all known cases this has been caused by a web server or proxy misconfiguration. Either the web server is not including a Last-Modified header at all or a proxy server is stripping it out. In particular this issue has been seen with the Vignette Trusted Authentication Service (TAS) and Microsoft ISA Proxy but is possibly with any server or proxy if configured incorrectly.

Note that using the “Pragma: no-cache” header for the EditLive! files does not trigger these extreme load times. The “Pragma: no-cache” header still allows the jar file to be cached, but the plugin checks for updates with every new browser session. If EditLive! hasn’t been updated, the file is not downloaded again.

Solution

The server or proxy configuration must be corrected so that the Last-Modified header is correctly sent. It is not possible to work around the issue within EditLive! or the user’s computer configuration.

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