Autocomplete timeout error in Web UI

[rjpaw]

RHEL 4
ZCS 3.2b2

I was in the Web UI yesterday and started to get error messages flash in the bottom left corner of the Web UI complaining about an timeout with auto complete. It gave another message, something about Auto complete being disabled, and to renable it you had do something else, but the message disappeared before I could find out what the rest of it said. At that point, Firefox hung on me so I couldn't check the status messages.

I tried looking in most of the logs in /opt/zimbra/log and /var/log but I can't seem to find any of those error messages.

I've also since tried stopping the services and restarting, even restarting the server, but auto complete will not come back on. Anyone have any ideas how to get it back on?

Poked around in the config with zmprov, but couldn't really see anything related to auto complete that was disabled

Any Help would be appreciated.

[rjpaw]

Ok, found out where to re-enable it. In the Web mail UI, go to options and check "Use global Address list when autocompleting addresses."

That enables the auto complete feature again, however I'm still getting the error in the Web mail UI "GAL autocomplete timed out." I can enter in a few letters into the TO field, and a list appears briefly before the errors start. after that, the errors occur as soon as I enter another letter, even if I clear the field and try and start over again.

Eventually I'll get an error: "Disabling GAL autocomplete due to timeouts (can be re-enabled via Options)

So far I get this error in Firefox and IE, and on two different machines, so I'm reasonably certain something's changed server side. GAL lookups still work fine the old fashioned way.

Again, any help would be apprecaited.

[cdamon]

Autocompleting from the GAL is a new feature. Unlike regular autocomplete (which goes against the in-memory personal contacts), it requires a response from the server. We gave it a relatively short timeout (500ms) so that it won't interfere with the UI if it's slow. If there are five consecutive timeouts, we disable the feature.

Originally, we disabled it by changing the user's preferences (there is a preference for whether you want to autocomplete against the GAL at all, which is off by default - it's also settable via the COS). Later, we decided that's too intrusive, so now there's an analogous preference that has session scope. It only appears in the Options if it's been disabled, and allows the user to turn it back on for the session. (Of course, it must also be enabled via the main preference.)

You're right, the toast isn't there very long. We should either move the notice to a dialog, or come up with a way for the toast to be more noticeable.

-Conrad

[rjpaw]

Thanks for all the info. That's exactly what's happening.

I don't supposed there's a way to change how long that time out is? This was working for me without any timeout errors for about a week before this problem occured.

Thanks again!

[REMcycle]

Was there any resolution for this?

Our Zimbra server syncs up with a very large GAL on a college campus as well as the local Address Book, and I can't have this timing out every time it takes more than 500 ms to resolve.

So can I change this timeout period, or do I have to tell my VP that Zimbra won't allow us to use the campus GAL?

[cdamon]

Originally Posted by REMcycle

Was there any resolution for this?

Our Zimbra server syncs up with a very large GAL on a college campus as well as the local Address Book, and I can't have this timing out every time it takes more than 500 ms to resolve.

So can I change this timeout period, or do I have to tell my VP that Zimbra won't allow us to use the campus GAL?

There are a couple of constants in ZmContactList.js that you might want to look at:

ZmContactList.AC_GAL_TIMEOUT = 15; // GAL autocomplete timeout (in seconds)
ZmContactList.AC_GAL_FAILURES = 5; // # of GAL autocomplete timeouts before disabling it

[Rich Graves]

Did anything relevant change from 5.0.6 to 5.0.7? It was fine from 5.0.3-5.0.6, but since the 5.0.7 upgrade everyone has been seeing "Waiting for GAL..." spinning for much longer than 15 seconds. I just opened Support Case 00026019.

Only a problem in the AJAX client -- HTML client is fine.

[nrc]

Any update on this? Did auto-complete LDAP lookups switch to SSL with this update?

Our users are starting to get comfortable with the product. I'd hate to have a performance problem crop up right now.

[Rich Graves]

This mostly fixed the problem for me:

zmprov md domain.com zimbragaltokenizeautocompletekey '' zimbragaltokenizesearchkey ''

And this reliably causes it to recur:

zmprov md domain.com zimbragaltokenizeautocompletekey and zimbragaltokenizesearchkey and

(with a zmprov fc domain domain.com or restart as appropriate)

The bug that originally defined zimbragaltokenizeautocompletekey appears to have gone private so that I can't see it anymore. Has that functionality been removed?

See also Bug 29151 – Autocomplete External GAL - Search Result Refreshes Continuously, perhaps.

zimbragaltokenizeautocompletekey=and tokenizes search terms into spaces, which can enhance results in some cases. For example, if someone knows me as Rick but my LDAP commonName is Rich, they can search for "R Graves" and find me either way, without putting so many wildcards into your LDAP search filter that you're overwhelmed with false positives.

The attribute wasn't documented anywhere but one bugzilla issue (which I can't find anymore), so I guess it wasn't QA'd. I haven't created a bug yet because my support case might turn up a better description of the problem.

[Rich Graves]

Ah, here's the original bug. I'll reopen as a regression. Bug 21873 – GAL autocomplete should handle multiple tokens