Hello all.
Recently our Xibo systems have, unprecedentedly, decided to stop updating one of our displays. This display was updating fine until earlier today, when the issue was discovered whilst changing the layout. The layouts are updated daily and so this issue must have arose between today’s layout being set and the change being made. My testing and investigation has yielded no results, leaving me to put it up to you.
Let me know if you need any more information.
Thanks.
What versions of the CMS and Players are you running? And on what operating systems?
Xibo is running on Version 1.7.7 with the Windows OS.
On the problem Player, what is shown on the Player information screen (You press i on the keyboard with the Player running to bring that up). It may be easiest to post a screenshot.
Looking at the log, I’d say the CMS is 1.7.8 not 1.7.7? Is that correct? It makes a big difference to how we proceed. On that basis, please can you double check the Player version too.
Sorry, the player is running 1.7.8, but the management side is running 1.7.7. Not sure why this is set like this.
As to getting a screenshot of the information screen; I cannot do this as I currently do not have physical access to the machine nor can I remotely connect.
Is the Player shown as “Logged In” in the CMS on the Display page?
Yes it is, status is also showing as up to date.
On the Display page, can you edit the Display, and then save it, making no changes.
That will force the Display cache to be cleared and it will cause any files missing to be downloaded.
That seems to have worked! Any ideas on what caused this to occur in the first place?
The CMS holds a cache of the data that the Player needs when it connects. All the time that there’s “no change”, then the CMS can serve that cache to the Player which greatly reduces the work the CMS needs to do each time.
However, sometimes, a change you make in the system should result in a change to the Player, but the cache isn’t properly cleared. Eventually the cache expires and the problem would have rectified itself.
We have one open bug regarding this at present. Do you by chance use Campaigns on that Players schedule? And if so, was the change to a layout in a campaign?
Otherwise if it normally works, it could just be a one-off thing that won’t reoccur.
We do not use campaigns, however the layout still does not seem to be refreshing either normally or after forcing a cache refresh, as did work just a moment ago.
If you’re not using campaigns then as far as I know the cache clear works as expected.
Don’t forget you’ll need to allow time for your changes to download, and the running version of the layout to complete before your changes will be shown.
The player still seems to not be updating, no idea why - should be updating every minute.
What is the duration on your layouts? If the’re really long, then you’ll have to wait for the current one to finish playing before the new one will be shown, so it may well be updated, but will still show old content until then.
The duration was set to 84600 (23.5 hours) and I have now changed this to 10, for the purposes of testing. However, this has not resulted in a change yet - would this be due to the previous 23.5 hours not finishing, meaning I would have to wait for this before any changes would take place?
Exactly so. You could schedule a layout with priority to kill the old schedule.
Hi Alex, I am blj 's colleague. First of all I would like to say thanks for your responsiveness, very impressive. We believe the issue in the end was mainly down to the issue with the display caching that was fixed in version 1.7.8 . Updating the CMS seems to have resolved this for us.
Thanks again.