Equalify Dashboard - Audits Timing Out Before Completion

[mrfu-space]

Describe the bug
A user from the School of Public Health reported that audits in the Equalify Dashboard appear to time out before the report successfully updates. This occurs even when the audit is manually triggered.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Log in to the application.
2. Create a new audit.
3. Initiate or wait for the audit scan to begin.
4. Allow the scan to run for several minutes.
5. Observe that the audit times out before the report is updated.

Expected behavior
The audit scan should complete successfully, and the report should update and display the latest results without timing out or failing to refresh.

Screenshots
N/A - user has not included screenshots

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: Unknown (not specified by the user)
• Browser: Unknown (not specified by the user)
• Version: Unknown (not specified by the user)

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device: N/A
• OS: N/A
• Browser: N/A
• Version: N/A

Additional context
A related ticket has been included for your reference. According to the user, the issue started recently after previously working as expected for several months.

[azdak]

Hey @mrfu-space - thanks for the issue. @heythisischris and I just discussed- we think there was a problem/bug that may have arisen during the major performance refactor we implemented earlier this month, and Chris is looking into it as a priority. We'll keep you posted!

[mrfu-space]

Thanks for looking into this!

[bbertucc]

@heythisischris any updates?

[heythisischris]

Hi @mrfu-space,

Just giving a quick update- we performed a brief investigation and found that certain URLs tied to these "timed-out" audits have had origin website requests which exceeded 15 seconds. This significantly degrades Equalify's scanning performance. We're seeing what we can do on our end to resolve this, and we'll post an update as soon as we have a complete fix. Some of it might be in our control, some of it might not.

[heythisischris]

We've completed our investigation and confirmed that the audits in question are completing successfully, just slower than expected. Looking at this audit's last 10 scans, they've consistently taken 3-5 hours each to process all 2,513 URLs (today's run is on the same trajectory).

The root cause is origin-site response time: certain pages on publichealth.uic.edu are taking 15+ seconds to load, which forces our scanner to hit its per-page timeout repeatedly. This isn't a failure on our end- our scanner is correctly waiting, retrying, and ultimately completing, but it does mean scans run much longer than for sites that respond quickly. Each scan does ultimately complete and the report does update.

What we're doing:

• Better in-app messaging during long scans- adding a small info note on the audit page so users know to expect multi-hour completion times for large sites.
• Slightly relaxed page timeout- bumped to 30s to give marginally slow pages a better chance of scanning successfully.
• Email notifications- if you haven't already, we'd recommend enabling email notifications on your audit so you don't have to babysit the page (Edit Audit, Add Email Notification).
• Investigating what we can do on our end to handle slow-origin sites better. Some of this might require coordination with the site owner to look at server response times.

If a future scan ever truly fails rather than just running long, the audit will show a "Failed" status. So far that hasn't happened on these reports.

[mrfu-space]

Hi @heythisischris - Thanks so much for letting us know! We appreciate you taking care of this.

[azdak]

Closing this as the fix @heythisischris mentioned has been pushed to production- @mrfu-space please feel free to comment here or open a new ticket if the issue reoccurs!