> 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?

> 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.

> > 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.

> The instructions for securing elogd using an SSL proxy are incomplete.
> http://midas.psi.ch/elog/adminguide.html#secure
> http://midas.psi.ch/elogs/contributions/11
> 
> If you follow these instructions, elogd will still listen for and accept non-SSL connections on it's own TCP port bypassing the SSL proxy.
> 
> (True, the elogd TCP port number is somewhat secret, so there is some security-by-obscurity here).
> 
> To secure the elogd TCP port against connections that bypass the SSL proxy, elogd has to be started
> with the "-n localhost" command line options.
> 
> To add this option, one has to edit /etc/init.d/elogd. I do not know if this change will be lost when the elog rpm package is updated.
> 
> It would be better if this option could have been specified through elogd.conf.
> 
> The "-n" command line option is not documented here
> http://midas.psi.ch/elog/adminguide.html#config
> but is visible if you run "elogd -h".
> 
> P.S. Even with "-n localhost", users of the local machine can bypass the SSL proxy.
> 
> K.O.

I added the option "interface" to the config file. So you could do

[global]
...
interface = localhost


It was not there originally since most people who care about security use a firewall. The firewall (either locally or one another machine), opens only port 443 for the secure connection and 
not the non-secure one (typically 80 or 8080). This way this has not been an issue in the past. As you guessed correctly the -n option would be overwritten by an rpm package update, so 
that's why I added the "interface" option.

> Is there any way to include the text of a log message in the CSV export? 
> Anyway to include a pointer to the attachment?

The text of a log message is usually several lines long. To my knowledge, CSV
only allows single line values, that's why I excluded the text field from the
CSV export. This is different in the XML export, which supports multi-line
values. If you teach me however how multi-line values can be represented in
CSV format, I could easily add that.

As for the attachment, do you just need a name, or a URL back to the logbook?
Should the pointer be in the form "http://elog.server/logbook/attachment.jpg"
or in HTML form like <a href="http:/...">attachment</a> ?

> > Is there any way to include the text of a log message in the CSV export? 
> > Anyway to include a pointer to the attachment?
> 
> The text of a log message is usually several lines long. To my knowledge, CSV
> only allows single line values, that's why I excluded the text field from the
> CSV export. This is different in the XML export, which supports multi-line
> values. If you teach me however how multi-line values can be represented in
> CSV format, I could easily add that.
> 
> As for the attachment, do you just need a name, or a URL back to the logbook?
> Should the pointer be in the form "http://elog.server/logbook/attachment.jpg"
> or in HTML form like <a href="http:/...">attachment</a> ?

I will attempt to use an active x script in a DTS package on SQL Server to parse
the xml and load it into the database. I can see where CSV has it's limitations.

URL = http://{your host}:8080/