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Slow Joomla Administrator interface

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I recently came across a new problem on one of the Joomla websites I manage.

Whereas the frontend (what a visitor see) of the Joomla site was as fast as ever, the Joomla backend administrator interface was suddenly paintakingly slow.

With slow I mean that e.g. login to the site which normally takes a few seconds now took several minutes, and might even fail alltogether.

Google Search

My first stop was to do a quick Google search to see if there was an obvious solution. Without success here I therefore decided to have a quick look at the installation itself.

Login to cPanel

2018 02 22 cPanelMy second stop was to login to the webhosting cPanel of the site in question, and see if there was anything unusual.

Within the cPanel I had a quick look at the database.

The reason for doing so, was that I a few times in the past have experienced that problems with Joomla sites could be due to a database curruption of some kind.

I instantly noticed that the database size was a staggering 950Mb in size. Typically a Joomla site like the one in question would only have a database between 5Mb - 10Mb depending on the amount of content.

phpMyAdmin

I therefore decided to investigate a bit further and entered phpMyAdmin to look at the tables within the database.

When looking at the database tables, I simply ordered these based on the size of the database tables, and found straight away that it was the "xxxx_session" table that was the culprit.

This table alone counted for about 98% of the total database size.

 

This table is storing temporary session information, and should be emptied automatically at regular intervals.

Obviously, this had not been emptied automatically, so I was bold enough to simply press the "empty" button on that table to clear out the whole table.

To completely empty this table might of course have a negative effect, but the problem itself for me outweighed this.

 

As soon as this table was emptied the admin interface was back to it old self again, working flawlessly and lightning fast again.

 

So, now I just have to monitor the site and the database table in question over the next few days to see if this table build itself up again. If so, then I have some more troubleshooting to do.

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Blank mainpage on SecurityCheckPro after upgrade

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I yesterday experienced a blank mainpage for SecurityCheckPro in the Joomla backend.

As this happened after an upgrade where also SecurityCheckPro was updated I assumed that there was a bug in SecurityCheckPro.

I then did a rollback to the previous version of SecurityCheckPro only to find that the problem was still there.

I therefore started to look at the other items that was upgraded at the same time, and simply uninstalled these one by one until I found the culprit that conflicted with SecurityCheckPro.

After uninstalling the Joomla extension called "Advanced Module Manager" by Regular Labs, I was again able to access the SecurityCheckPro frontpage.

So for the moment I left the AMM uninstalled, and notified the SCP developer of my findings.

The developer since issued a fix for SCP which will be in the next release. After trying this I verified that this issue seem to be solved.

 

More info in the SCP forum:

http://tinyurl.com/gns8er3

 

More info on the software and extensions mentioned:

Joomla

SecurityCheckPro

Advanced Module Manager

 

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How to fix 100% disk usage in Windows

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gaasen windows disk 100percentSeveral people are experiencing a painstakingly slow computer after the latest upgrade to Windows 10. When looking in the task manager they find that the disk usage is "stuck" at 100% even though hardly any processes are running.

 

If you are experiencing something similar, then simply press "ctrl-alt-delete" and then open the Task Manager to view if this the problem on your computer as well.

 

There are many things that could cause this problem, but in my experience most cases are solved with these three remedies:

 

1) Stop and Disable "Windows Search" in services.msc

a) Click search icon or click on the windows log in your bottom left corner.

b) Write in "services.msc" and then click enter to open Services.

c) Locate "Windows Search"

d) Rightclick "Windows Search"and then leftclick on "Properties".

e) Change "Startup Type" to Disabled

f) Stop the service

g) Click "apply" and "Ok"

 

2) Stop and Disable "Superfetch" in services.msc

a) Click search icon or click on the windows log in your bottom left corner.

b) Write in "services.msc" and then click enter to open Services.

c) Locate "Superfetch"

d) Rightclick "Superfetch" and then leftclick on "Properties".

e) Change "Startup Type" to Disabled

f) Stop the service

g) Click "apply" and "Ok"

 

UPDATE 11/12/2019:

After Microsoft released Windows version 1809 the superfetch service was renamed to SysMain.

If you previously disabled Superfetch as per above, then please note that this deactivation is now gone, and the replacement SysMain, is now active and enabled, and might cause problems for you.

You therefore have to go through the steps again, and this time deactivate the service called SysMain.

 

Finally, I after deactivating Superfetch/SysMain I will recommend you to reboot the computer a couple of times to check if this has solved your problem.

If the problem still exist, then go to the next step below.

 

3) Stop and Disable "BITS - Background Intelligent Transfer Service" in services.msc

a) Click search icon or click on the windows log in your bottom left corner.

b) Write in "services.msc" and then click enter to open Services.

c) Locate "Background Intelligent Transfer Service"

d) Rightclick "Windows Search"and then leftclick on "Properties".

e) Change "Startup Type" to Disabled

f) Stop the service

g) Click "apply" and "Ok"

 

4) Change Page File Sizes

a) Click search icon or click on the windows log in your bottom left corner.

b) Write in "control panel" and then click enter to open the old fashioned Control Panel from previous version of Windows.

c) Click on "System".

d) Click on "Advanced System Settings" on the left.

e) Click on "Settings" in the Performance box.

f) Click on "Advanced" tab.

g) Click on "Change" in the Virtual Memory Box.

h) Click on "Custom Size"

i) You will now have two boxes to fill. (Initial Size, and Maximum Size)

What you insert here is depending on the amount of RAM you have on your computer.

        If you e.g. have 4GB of Ram, then you need to insert 4 x 1024 = 4096 (in the initial size box), and then double that at 8192 in the Maximum Size box.

        If you e.g. have 8GB of Ram, then you need to insert 8 x 1024 = 8192 (in the initial size box), and then double that at 16384 in the Maximum Size box.

j) When you have inserted your values, then click "Set", and finally click "OK"

k) Click "OK" on the next couple of boxes to close these.

l) Reboot the computer.

 

 

When the computer now start up again, the problem is hopefully fixed.

(Sometimes, I find that all these measures only kick in after 2-3 reboots. Not sure why, but think it must be some sort of queueing going on.....)

In my experience the above measures should sort most such problems, but should the problem however still be there, then I would advice to look at the following url's for some further suggestions:

 

http://tinyurl.com/hl28s5q

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-2813275/disk-usage-100.html

 

 

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Problems with Drag-And-Drop in Microsoft Outlook 2016

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gaasen open outlook as administratorI have a few times come across problems with the Drag-And-Drop functionality in Microsoft Outlook 2016 on a Windows based PC.

 

When clicking and holding the left mousebutton down (to prepare to Drag the item to a diffferent folder), the email simply opens as if I just left clicked the email.

When retrying a couple of times the move seem to work often on the third attempt.

 

The solution that worked for me was to simply do the following:

 

1) Close Outlook

2) Open Outlook as an administrator by right clicking on the item on the desktop (or by seaching for Outlook within your menu).

3) Close Outlook again

4) Open Outlook as usual (not as an administrator)

 

That little fix normally sort this problem for me.

 

 

 

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Disable Annoying AcdSee popups

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I have been using AcdSee photosoftware for over 15 years now, and have found it a great piece of software to manage my growing collection of photos.

However, in the last few years they have lost the plot completely and are spamming their customerbase in an alarming tempo.

 

Almost daily (at least weekly) emails with encouragement to upgrade and spend more money with them, and also constant popups in Windows with the same message.

It has got to the point where I am actually considering removing their software alltogether as this is getting ridiculous.

 

Before going to that extreme, I have however done/tried the following:

 

1) Login to my online AcdSee account, and removed the tick for receiving promotions.

Simply go to http://www.acdsee.com and login there with your account

 

 

2) Remove/disable the annoying acdINtouch software:

 

To do this in Windows 10, simply do the following:

– Close ACDSee

– Open “Task Manager” by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc , goto "Startup" and disable all items withthe name “acdID Intouch2”

 

3) 
– In Windows explorer, navigate to ACDSee 17 application folder at “C:\Program Files (x86) \ACD Systems\ACDSee \17.0”
– Rename “acdIDInTouch2.exe” to a different name, e.g. “acdIDInTouch2.exe-disable”
– Restart ACDSee.

 

Hopefully this should have removed all these annoying AcdSee spam notifications and emails.

 

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Blank Frontend after Joomla 3.5 upgrade

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Are you experiencing a blank frontend/frontpage after upgrading to Joomla 3.5?

Chances are that you have either of these two problems;

 

1) Non compatible Template.

If you like me are using Artisteer as your template development software, simply open your current template in a current version of Artisteer, then save and export a new template. Then install the new template onto your Joomla site and activate this. Finally clear the cache to see if that has made any difference to you.

 

If you however are using a purchased template, then look to see if there has been an update released by the template developer.

 

 

2) Non compatible Joomla Extension.

If the template trick didn't work it is likely that one of your Joomla Extensions are causing this error.

In my case it was the extension called ARI Image Slider (mod_ariimageslider) that caused this. I then simply downloaded the updated module from the developers site, installed that, and viola everything was back to normal.