[OJS 3.1.0.1] Adding a Contributor - System Hangs

Hi, We running OJS version 3.1.0.1 and PHP version 5.6.4. We are assisting another department on campus in manually creating an online journal issue. Everything is working fine except when we try to “Add a Contributor” in Submission and Publication Metadata. When we enter the author’s name and click save at the bottom of the page, OJS just spins. We’ve checked the following files but haven’t found a problem:

lib/pkp/templates/controllers/grid/users/author/form/authorForm.tpl.
lib/pkp/controllers/grid/users/author/form/AuthorForm.inc.php
public_html/lib/pkp/classes/submission/PKPSubmissionMetadataFormImplement

We’ve looked through our logs but haven’t found anything there that stands out. It looks like a lot of warnings. Here’s a sample from when we tried to complete the process this afternoon:

[08-Aug-2019 18:27:54 UTC] PHP Strict Standards: Declaration of ArticleHandler::initialize() should be compatible with PKPHandler::initialize($request) in /home/umassded/public_html/pages/article/ArticleHandler.inc.php on line 0
[08-Aug-2019 18:27:54 UTC] PHP Strict Standards: Declaration of CustomBlockPlugin::getSeq() should be compatible with BlockPlugin::getSeq($contextId = NULL) in /home/umassded/public_html/plugins/generic/customBlockManager/CustomBlockPlugin.inc.php on line 0
[08-Aug-2019 18:27:54 UTC] PHP Strict Standards: Declaration of CustomBlockPlugin::getBlockContext() should be compatible with BlockPlugin::getBlockContext($contextId = NULL) in /home/umassded/public_html/plugins/generic/customBlockManager/CustomBlockPlugin.inc.php on line 0
[08-Aug-2019 18:27:54 UTC] PHP Strict Standards: Declaration of CustomBlockPlugin::getEnabled() should be compatible with BlockPlugin::getEnabled($contextId = NULL) in /home/umassded/public_html/plugins/generic/customBlockManager/CustomBlockPlugin.inc.php on line 0
[08-Aug-2019 18:27:54 UTC] PHP Strict Standards: Declaration of CustomBlockPlugin::getContents() should be compatible with BlockPlugin::getContents($templateMgr, $request = NULL) in /home/umassded/public_html/plugins/generic/customBlockManager/CustomBlockPlugin.inc.php on line 0
[08-Aug-2019 18:27:54 UTC] PHP Strict Standards: Declaration of SubmissionFileDAO::fromRow() should be compatible with PKPSubmissionFileDAO::fromRow($row, $fileImplementation) in /home/umassded/public_html/classes/article/SubmissionFileDAO.inc.php on line 23
[08-Aug-2019 18:27:54 UTC] PHP Strict Standards: Declaration of SubmissionKeywordEntryDAO::getByControlledVocabId() should be compatible with ControlledVocabEntryDAO::getByControlledVocabId($controlledVocabId, $rangeInfo = NULL, $filter = NULL) in /home/umassded/public_html/lib/pkp/classes/submission/SubmissionKeywordEntryDAO.inc.php on line 20

Here’s what I see when I use the inspect tool in my browser:

image

Any ideas as to what might be causing this issue or which files I should be looking at?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Matt

Hi Matt,

First, the PHP warnings about strict standards are just cosmetic and wouldn’t cause the slowdown you’re seeing. I am assuming that the process of adding a contributor does eventually finish? If so, you can try turning “debug” to “on” in your OJS config file, and that will enable database query debugging. It will be very, very verbose but you’ll get an idea of what queries are running and which ones are being slow. You can then take those queries and run them with an “explain” syntax i.e. from the MySQL command line or in phpmyadmin:

explain select * from authors...

And MySQL will tell you how it is optimizing the query. Is this a new installation? Are there already many contributors? Maybe running some optimize table commands will help? We’ve also noticed substantial performance improvements by converting tables from MyISAM to InnoDB if that’s also a possibility.

Cheers,
Jason

Thanks for the response, Jason! Unfortunately the process of adding a contributor does not finish. The installation is not new and even on our development environment we have many contributors. So thank you for suggesting the we run some optimize table commands. Prior to your response, we tried upgrading to 3.1.2.1 but encountered a new issue (i.e., When we click on “Submission” in the admin console we see the four tabs but the tabs aren’t working). The rest of the site seems to work fine.) As soon as we fix this issue, we will try your advice regarding optimize table commands. OJS_blank_page|690x346

Hi Matt,

If you’re seeing blank pages on tabs after upgrading, there are probably associated “fatal errors” in your PHP error log. They’d be marked as such.

Cheers,
Jason