(Pre)Loading Resources

PennController for IBEX Forums Support (Pre)Loading Resources

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  • #6569
    AndreasK
    Participant

    Hi Jeremy,

    I’m running an experiment with a lexical-decision and a recall task that need a lot of audio files to be loaded into PC-IBEX. The files for these and some other smaller tasks are hosted in eight different .zip folders in an AWS S3 bucket.

    My first trial is a Check.Preloaded() trial that lasts for 5 minutes to give PC-IBEX some time to access the .zip folders and preload the files. My problem is that not all the resources are loaded so that I get stuck on the waiting screen when I go through the experiment. The interesting thing is that sometimes it happens for the recall task and then sometimes it happens for one of the smaller tasks after that. It happens only very rarely that I get to run through the whole experiment. However, it has worked so I think my tables and file names are OK.

    I was wondering if there is anything I could do to make this more reliable. I checked the log in debug window and it seems that sometimes certain .zip folders are not accessed. Other times, they are downloaded but then the necessary files are not preloaded, even when the relevant trial is initiated.

    I’ve tried clearing my cache but to no avail and I’ve also tried combining all the files into a single .zip file but that didn’t seem to fix it either.
    When I incorporated multiple Check.Preloaded() commands throughout the experiment, I still got stuck from time to time because I understand that this actually doesn’t guarantee that the files will be preloaded.

    Which steps could I take to make the loading more consistent?

    Thank you,
    Andreas

    #6570
    Jeremy
    Keymaster

    Hi Andreas,

    Just to be clear, let me reiterate that CheckPreloaded will check that the resources have preloaded: it will not initiate or force any preloading. So resource preloading is unaffected by how many CheckPreloaded commands you use in your script. All resources start preloading as soon as your experiment page opens.

    You say that “Other times, they are downloaded but then the necessary files are not preloaded”: if the zip files containing all the resource files for a trial were successfully downloaded, there should be no reason for that trial to insert a preloading screen at all.

    Would you mind sharing the link to your experiment with me, either here or at support@pcibex.net?

    Jeremy

    #6572
    AndreasK
    Participant

    Hi Jeremy,

    Many thanks for your response. I have just sent you the link to the experiment via email.

    Andreas

    #6582
    Jeremy
    Keymaster

    Issue resolved by email

    The solution consisted in:
    – moving some images used early on in the experiment, from a zip file on the S3 bucket directly into the Resources folder of the project, so that they could be fetched independently from the requests to the S3 bucket
    – splitting a big zip file (~400MB) in two smaller zip files
    – optionally moving the CheckPreloaded trial later in the experiment, in order to give PennController more time to download the zip files and preloading the resources in the background before reaching that screen

    Jeremy

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