Nice blocks, but contains a real issue

Hi there,

Thanks for your report. We haven’t had any reports of this outside of this ticket, so let’s try and see what’s going on. Are you on the latest version of Atomic Blocks (1.2.9) and Gutenberg (3.5.0)?

Which part of editing the CTA block is giving you trouble? If you delete the block, refresh the page, and start again, does it still give you trouble? Does the block show any console errors?

Finally, which browsers are you checking in? I’ve just tested Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Let me know a few more details and we’ll get it fixed up!

Hello,

Good of you to drop in so quickly. Before writing the short report I did what you suggested. Deleting the block, even creating several test pages just to see which combinations might cause the problem etc. I use the latest version of Atomic Blocks and Gutenberg. I update as soon as an update is available.
I tested in Safari and Firefox, latest versions, on an iMac.

The trouble occurred when I subsequently entered the CTA Title, the CTA text, and the CTA button text, when I came back to edit the CTA text again, my processor load soared and the rainbow disk started spinning, practically taking all possibility of interaction away. On 2 occassions I had to reboot the computer. And later I managed to force quit the browsers, optimise memory, and start over.

I tested it on a website which already had an installed, and updated version of AB, and also on a website where I installed AB today.

Strangely enough, I came back after dinner, saw your message and wanted to reproduce the error, and I am getting the effect.

Which makes me think there might be an unwanted interaction with another plugin. E.g. I deactivated another blocks plugin recentlty, because it consistently broke Gutenberg’s column layout.

As I said, at first I thought that Firefox was the culprit, because of the heavy memory footprint, but switching to Safari gave me the exact same result.

Now I have created all AB blocks on one page. Everything works as it should. To test is well, I have created 5 CTA block, 1 of which I have nested in a container. All 5 work fine, even after repeatedly editing and re-editing the title, text and button text. Nothing much has changed over these hours, so I have to figure it out.

I have to systematically recreate the exact configuration that I had earlier to see if the problem occurs again, and when. It may be an interaction between AB and some other plugin I deactivated to analyse all possibilities.

So that will take some time. But I will be back with the results soon.

Good of you to jump in.

Hi there.

I’m sorry to say that the problem persists. When I wrote the earlier reply I could not replicate the problem and everything went smoothly. So I went on editing the 4 CTA blocks that I needed. I changed the background colour, and filled in the text in the right spots. I experimented with one CTA block to style it with a background image, which it didn’t write display as I wanted, but that was not the issue. After working for a while I speeded up and switched from one CTA block to the other quite quickly to harmonise the texts in both blocks. At that moment the memory usage went up from 50% to 95% and the computer froze. I could see that actions reached the system, but with a delay of minutes. The otherwise completely silent fan became audible. I could not stop the browser, or optimise the memory, and had to reboot by manually pushing the on/off button. I must say that this otherwise never happens, because the computer is in ship shape.
I did not change anything with respect to running plugins, and no other software was running apart from the browser, Firefox in this case. I hope this helps.

Hi there,

I’ll continue looking into this. Because of the erratic behavior, I have a feeling it’s not the block. It could be a deeper issue with Gutenberg or your setup. The blocks are relatively simple themselves, and don’t have the power to create that kind of memory leak that I’m aware of. I will keep looking into this and would appreciate an update if you figure out what is happening!

Hi,

I agree that it is weird. And I suspect that it must be some kind of interaction with Gutenberg that causes the issue. I have noticed one other freeze when editing a block that was unrelated to the AB-CTA block. When I activated AB to do some further testing nothing much happened. When I decided to use a CTA-block all went well. Until I can back to the block to edit the main text. Immediately my memory use soared to 94% and the iMac stopped responding until I managed to quit Firefox.

There is a pattern, when looking back at the issue. The freeze occurs when editing an element/block, repeatedly. Like writing something, deleting some letters, and retyping. Insofar as I can tell now, it may indeed be some deeper Gutenberg issue (because it once happened when NOT editing an AB CTA-block), but in most cases it occurred when editing a CTA-block. So editing the CTA-block may be the trigger that activates an underlying problem in Gutenberg. You may well be right there.

I only don’t know how, and what. You may have noticed that I upped the stars, so as not to punish AB for something that is somewhere deeper under the surface. But there is a correlation, and you might have to mingle with the Gutenberg team to find out more.

My setup is fairly clean and optimised. I never experience any trouble, and when working with WordPress this is the only issue I repeatedly, apart from the fact that the Gutenberg interface itself is far from perfect, and complete yet.

The AB blocks are quite useful, and being able to use the AB CTA-block would save a lot of hassle, because it’s customisation options are really nice and easy to use.

I really appreciate the detailed info you are sending along. I’m going to pass this along to some of the devs working on Gutenberg to see if we can figure out what is going on! Thanks for your patience and hopefully we’ll have a fix for you soon!

No problem.

I think I have some more information for you to isolate the problem. I just tried it again on several pages and was editing the CTA block without problems. Then all of a sudden the memory use went up from 43% to 94% and the iMac froze. After killing all processes I recapitulated and discovered that it happened when deleting text from the “Call-to-action text” field. More in particular. When I fill in this text field and want to change the text, I start deleting the text with backspace. When the text-cursor arrives at the last letter to be removed (so the first letter/character of the sentence, or CTA-text” the memory use soars.

I have repeated this procedure > writing > deleting with backspace; several times and the problem repeated itself. So immediately upon deletion of the last remaining letter, which will not be deleted by the way, all memory is sucked into this procedure. Perhaps this has something to do with the CTA block’s CTA-text field not being allowed to be empty. I don’t know.

I hope this helps you to identify the problem.

Cheers.

EB