osTicket in 'offline' mode

RBGE

I realise the subject of an online service desk system in offline mode may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but bear with me here 😃 First off, setup is as follows:
osTicket 1.14.1
Apache 2.4.41
PHP 7.3.13
MariaDB (reports as MySQL 10.3)
Using Office 365 for email
All boxes in the admin information dashboard are ticked

Earlier today our Internet connection failed for a few hours, and one of the things I use osTicket for is the Knowledgebase with a 'Service Status' page included and set to 'Featured'. However, when trying to update this page and let our users know of the problem (I obviously couldn't email them!), every single page view ended up taking ages as if waiting for a timeout. Obviously I wasn't expecting to send or receive any emails, but just navigating the site seemed to result in having to wait for a timeout on page load. As soon as our connection was restored, everything started working as normal again.
Is this just how osTicket works, or can anyone see anything that I might have setup incorrectly here? Obviously a service status page isn't much use if it can't report the service status :-)

Edit: just to add I do have a cron job running that polls the O365 mailbox, which obviously won't have worked during this time, but I'd still assume the internal site would work as normal??

ntozier

If the system tries to send emails (it still tries ... and has to time out).

If agent activity triggers the cron.php or clean up routines this can also result in email trying to be collect. Both of these things can cause a delay as it has to time out.

So during an internet outage these things can cause slowness issues that you are describing.

RBGE

Hmm, I guess it's just something I have to deal with then (although hopefully not very often!). While the cron job was attempting to poll the mailbox, this was running as a separate PHP process and I wouldn't expect it to cause timeouts on page views 🤔 I suppose the cron.php file that's being called by the PHP process may be holding up other stuff, but I'd expect (local) database access to be unaffected by this.
No great loss, I was just wondering if I'd set something up incorrectly 😇

Thanks for the reply!

ntozier

There has been a little talk on github about creating a mail queue system to alleviate the 'pauses' when sending/checking mail. Hopefully the devs will think that it is something that is worth while. I think that it would speed up the UI experience in certain use cases as well.

ramrajone

Is Stopping the poll of email mailbox when the internet goes down, does that help with a timeout?

ntozier

Aren't sure. You would have to try it and find out. Sending definitely does. I presume that collecting also would.