Yes, unwanted characters are in my file.  In fact, they are not visible under some editor.  So, I have found a reference from this site http://www.ventrino.com/blog/60/2008/07/three-little-characters-i%C2%BB%C2%BF-designed-to-make-your-life-hell/ about how to remove them.  Basically, file's properties has to set to either ASCII or Encode as UTF-8 without BOM.  Thanks.

> > I'm not an expert in debugging web applications. Here are my two cent:
> > We once had a problem when we hosted very large logbooks (several 10 thousands of entries) that the server would run
> > out of real memory and was slowed down by swapping. Therefore my first idea would be to monitor the server: Is
> > the CPU load peaking? What happens with the memory consumption? Any other suspicious process running on the server?
> > But it could be as well a network or browser problem. Did you try different browsers?
> > Did you check the elogd log file?
> 
> The logbook only has a few hundred entries, elogd is using only around 20-30 MB and there is enough free RAM. The load 
> average for the server is around 0.2, elogd only uses 5% CPU at most when it is accessed and the CPU is idle most of the 
> time. 
> 
> Strangely it happens mostly when using Chrome, and almost never with Firefox. I captured the network traffic, but I can't 
> see anything unusual. It just takes very long until the answer is returned by the elogd server.

My tuppance worth.  I have noticed (firefox) that some attachments take rather longer than might be expected to upload.  I
originally thought this was the ghostview program processing say a pdf to make pngs etc, but have more recently started to
question that assumption.  No solution or much clue, just another observation.

> > [13 Nov]
> > As my threads have lots of replies, I end up with a forest of ">" characters which makes it difficult to read
> > earlier quoted entries (what with word-wrapping of the browser).
> > I thought to replace the ">"s by a simple date entry prepended to the start of each reply. - much as I have 
> > given at the top of this initial entry.
> > 
> > So this is what I put in the config file:
> > 
> > ....
> > Time format = %a %d %b %y
> > Date format = %d %b
> > Prepend on reply = [$date] \n
> > ...
> > 
> > The time is used in the string for the Thread display.
> > 
> > Only I don't get the date, with the date format, prepended to replies but the time, in the time format, as
> > 
> > [Wed 13 Nov 13]
> > 
> > Now this is hardly a disaster, but any ideas why the date formatting is being ignored?
> 
> Hi David,
> yes, a $date is substituted with the "Time format" in the function build_subst_list().
> I guess that is a bug, but it could break many existing logbooks to change it.
> I leave this to Stefan.
> 
> There is a simple solution for your problem: you can execute a shell command.
> 
> Prepend on reply = $shell(date '+[%d %b]') \n
> Reply string =
> 
> That snipped will do exactly what you want :-) (of course you need to have the "-x" option to start elogd.)
> 
> Kind Regards
> Andreas

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for this, I'll give the solution a go.  
I take the point that if it's a bug, other logbooks may be affected if it were fixed; but perhaps another
parameter - $thedate or something could be created instead?

> I'm not an expert in debugging web applications. Here are my two cent:
> We once had a problem when we hosted very large logbooks (several 10 thousands of entries) that the server would run
> out of real memory and was slowed down by swapping. Therefore my first idea would be to monitor the server: Is
> the CPU load peaking? What happens with the memory consumption? Any other suspicious process running on the server?
> But it could be as well a network or browser problem. Did you try different browsers?
> Did you check the elogd log file?

The logbook only has a few hundred entries, elogd is using only around 20-30 MB and there is enough free RAM. The load 
average for the server is around 0.2, elogd only uses 5% CPU at most when it is accessed and the CPU is idle most of the 
time. 

Strangely it happens mostly when using Chrome, and almost never with Firefox. I captured the network traffic, but I can't 
see anything unusual. It just takes very long until the answer is returned by the elogd server.

> We recently installed ELOG and it works pretty well, but the load times are rather inconsistent. Most of the time 
> it is very fast, but it also often hangs for around 5-10 seconds while loading. It seems to affect all parts of 
> the page that are returned at random, so sometimes the main html file will hang, sometimes the css file and 
> sometimes the images.
> 
> The hardware it is running on is nothing special, an older 3 GHz Celeron, but it should be fast enough. It is 
> running on Debian 7. 
> 
> Any ideas what the problem could be, or how I could investigate it further to find the bottleneck?

I'm not an expert in debugging web applications. Here are my two cent:
We once had a problem when we hosted very large logbooks (several 10 thousands of entries) that the server would run
out of real memory and was slowed down by swapping. Therefore my first idea would be to monitor the server: Is
the CPU load peaking? What happens with the memory consumption? Any other suspicious process running on the server?
But it could be as well a network or browser problem. Did you try different browsers?
Did you check the elogd log file?

We recently installed ELOG and it works pretty well, but the load times are rather inconsistent. Most of the time 
it is very fast, but it also often hangs for around 5-10 seconds while loading. It seems to affect all parts of 
the page that are returned at random, so sometimes the main html file will hang, sometimes the css file and 
sometimes the images.

The hardware it is running on is nothing special, an older 3 GHz Celeron, but it should be fast enough. It is 
running on Debian 7. 

Any ideas what the problem could be, or how I could investigate it further to find the bottleneck?

Okay, why don't you just remove the unwanted characters from the html file? Because the attached file contains exactly those characters.

 I have downloaded a latest version.  It has displayed the new version as ELOG V2.9.2-bac715d where seems defined in GIT_REVISION as I guess.  Then I set Bottom Text Login to a html file, it still shows those unwanted characters.