Loss of Content on Captivate 9 Assessment Pages Published in HTML

Report · Mar 09, 2018

We have a series of courses developed in Captivate 9 and 2017 that are published in HTML. The courses work in our LMS as long as we run on one server. These courses are taken through the LMS that is in Citrix, IE 11 environment. When we turn on the load balancer between 2 servers, employees are randomly losing the content on the assessment question pages. Content pages seem to be unaffected. Sometimes the question is missing and the answer distractors show. Sometimes both the question and answer distractors are missing but you only see the radio buttons for the answers. Sometimes only part of the answers show. We have tried round robin and source IP F5 settings. Has anyone experienced these issues and know how to resolve them?

Report · Mar 09, 2018

That's an interesting issue.

I am far from an expert in load-balancing and how it works (for example, I don't know what 'IP F5' is).

Does this not happen when you publish to, or the server delivers, Flash/SWF versions?

I would *guess* that the HTML version, being comprised of several 'pieces' (as opposed to one self-contained SWF) is making several requests back to the server to assemble the pieces.

And the load balancer is not maintaining or handling those requests correctly...thus dropping random bits, resulting in incomplete content.

I don't know if that's how a published CP piece actually works to assemble in the browser, but it would make sense (to me) given the random incomplete issue you note.

Absolutely no problem with no load balancer, right?

Any way to examine the traffic during this issue? See if one balancer's requests back to the LMS are not being handled properly?

You've got a lot of delivery tech in the mix, between an LMS, Citrix, and a load balancer....

Also check your LMS logs, if possible. Perhaps it has more to do with JS-related requests, sending SCORM info?, when building the assessment slides - since this is only happening in quiz sections.

Is your LMS truly setup to handle this sort of approach? How does the LMS on one server know to handle the partial requests from a client, vs the duplicate LMS on another server? How do you keep the content in-sync?

Perhaps once the 'first' LMS gets the client request or core.initialize SCORM call...that one responds properly, but requests diverted to the other LMS server via the balancer...that LMS...how does it know to share the session? Know to the SCORM API has been initialized on the other server?
Though that doesn't really explain why it works properly in the content pages...

Very odd. Wish i had better advice. I'm curious what you may find...