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EyeMed_Don
Level 2
December 11, 2023
Solved

Launch Async Question

  • December 11, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 3349 views

During the major issue last Friday (#202312080015), we had some some websites appear to wait on Adobe Launch to load rather than continue in Google Chrome, even though those sites had async in the script tag for Launch in the HTML head.

 

Since Launch was not available during the issue, the website did not load for minutes until the browser finally timed out the Adobe Launch load.

 

script src="//assets.adobedtm.com/......../launch-XXXXXX.min.js" async=""

 

Once the Chrome browser cache was cleared though, the async keyword was respected and the website was able to load immediately while attempting to load Launch in the background.

 

Did anyone else experience this or have any thoughts on why this may have happened in our implementation?

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    Best answer by EyeMed_Don

    We are experiencing a similar issue. Have you resolved your issue completely?  If so, can you share


    Hello, our best theory is that our Single Page Apps with the issue were adding the Launch javascript to the HTML <head> programmatically, rather than just including it in the initial HTML page.  We are updating these Apps to include it in the initial HTML page.  None of our other Apps that included Launch in the initial HTML experienced the issue on our end.

    3 replies

    Jennifer_Dungan
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    December 11, 2023

    Everyone using the Adobe hosting experienced this... the async (the preferred implementation) allowed your other resources to continue loading... (but the site was still stuck in "waiting for resources" waiting for the Adobe files).

     

    Had you not had that, your site would have stopped at loading the JS file and not moved passed (i.e. your site rendering would have halted the site completely, a far worse impact).

     

    The issue was actually an issue with their cloud / content delivery vendor Akamai. All sites using Akamai directly were impacted by this issue much more severely. 

     

    Clearing browser cache would have had nothing to do with you seeing the sites start loading normally... the issue was being worked on actively by both Adobe and Akamai, the most likely scenario is that when you cleared your browser cache you reconnected to a different Akamai server that was functioning...

     

    Nothing you experienced was limited to you... 

     

    While this is a very low risk scenario of happening again (in all my years using Launch, this is the first time I've ever seen this issue - and we were early adopters), it's not impossible...

     

    If you are looking for ways to mitigate this, if you were using "self-hosted" files (i.e. setting up an SFTP host) in Launch, then the issue didn't impact sites the same way, since the files (unless your company uses Akamai) would not be hosted there.

     

    We use self-hosting... I use Adobe hosting for QA/Dev (so those environments were impacted), but Staging and Prod use our self-hosting.

     

    We use the Adobe Publishing Flow to build our Staging/Prod files to our SFTP server, then we have a process to deploy the files from SFTP to our own web server. 

     

    This could be an option you want to pursue if you are concerned. 

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      EyeMed_DonAuthor
      Level 2
      December 11, 2023

      Thanks Jennifer for the info.

       

      Our issue was some of ours sites did stop loading even though they had async in the Launch script tag.  It appeared specific to Google Chrome and users who had visited the site previously.  We did not see this on Safari or Firefox. Once the Chrome cache was cleared it worked as expected.  I was curios if anyone else in the community saw this as well.

      Jennifer_Dungan
      Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
      Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
      Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
      December 11, 2023

      I experienced the issue on all browsers, even on Chrome incognito... later into the day the issue became more sporadic depending on which cloud server I happened to load.

       

      I think you just happened to get lucky, you were probably checking your sites after the resolution had started rolling out.

       

      Unless you are saying, that some of your sites even with the async attribute were nothing but a white page until you cleared the cache... 

      In which case, that would likely have something to do with your sites specifically.

       

      Async just means the JS isn't render blocking... meaning that the resources that come after it can start and finish loading an executing while this file is doing its thing... the whole page won't "finish" loading until all the resources are complete or time-out...

        yuhuisg
        Community Advisor
        yuhuisgCommunity Advisor
        Community Advisor
        December 14, 2023

        It is unusual that your web pages stopped loading while the browser was trying to load a script asynchronously. Could it be that while your Launch snippet was async, but there was custom code in it that was synchronous?

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          EyeMed_DonAuthor
          Level 2
          December 14, 2023

          Thank you for the reply.  We have been looking into the website's SPA code as a possible lead on this as well.  

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            emcadoret60
            New Member
            December 15, 2023

            We are experiencing a similar issue. Have you resolved your issue completely?  If so, can you share

            NimashaJain
            Adobe Employee
            NimashaJainAdobe Employee
            Adobe Employee
            February 6, 2024

            @eyemed_don Did you find the suggested solutions helpful? It would be great if you can  mark the answer as correct for posterity. If you have found out solution yourself, share it with wider audience in the community.

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