Story map "glitch" loading wrong content & major lagging issues

[KaylaFermin]

Story map with rich content (over an hour of reading/ interacting content - photos, audio clips, text, maps) appears to have loading issues with various users. Some users are reporting map features are not appearing, the wrong photo appearing then the correct photo appearing when they scroll to the bottom of the "page", content not loading when user clicks on expanded map then goes back to story map, etc. Every "glitch" is slightly different and never the same. I have no issues viewing the content as long as I allow the story map to load for 5 minutes or more and have included instructions to do this for the users. They report that they allow the story map to load and do not scroll fast, yet there is a lag in the content. There are no issues reported when I republish the story map. How can I fix this issue to improve the user experience?

Thank you! 

[OwenGeo · Accepted solution]

Hi @KaylaFermin -- I'm sorry you and your colleagues are experiencing some unexpected behavior.

It does sound like you've added an extremely large amount of dynamic content into a single story. Although the story does what is possible to manage memory, a story is still a single web page. Having too much dynamic content to manage can cause issues. It also sounds like some of your web maps may not be optimized, so I'd look into caching data where possible, applying scale dependency so that very detailed layers are not rendered at small scales, using screenshots of maps where a dynamic/live map is not needed, or using hyperlinks to load maps or apps in separate tabs where isn't not necessary to have the map inline in the narrative.

Another strategy to try would be to break this story up into smaller stories. You can then add each individual story to a collection to group them together.

We haven't received other reports of intermittent issues matching this description, so I would recommend that you please contact Esri Support so they can help you troubleshoot this specific story and provide some additional guidance to avoid these issues.

[KaylaFermin]

Thank you! This is helpful! I will try some of these tactics. 

[rwrenner_abtglobal]

Sounds like this issue could be similar to what's described in Bug 000159642 although I'm unsure whether this thread pertains to StoryMaps or Classic because it's from a few years ago. 

I have also been experiencing this issue, although the embedded app in question is an Experience Builder rather than a 3rd party app.

The scrolling glitch happens both when editing (a lot, so much so it's hard to edit) and when viewing the storymap. It's also happening to another user within my org on the same storymap.