In the Matlab Documentation Center why do search results sometimes not display?

When I search for something in the MATLAB Documentation Center, I sometimes see the results of my search, but sometimes the actual results do not display. I can see that there are results in the "refine by ..." panes on the side. Sometimes if I refine by product or something else the results will appear, but other times a little "wait for it" symbol (vertical boxes moving to the right) will appear and disappear as if they are loading, and they will remain absent. Here is a screenshot of a search with results that are not displayed. You can see that it thinks it is showing me results 1 to 10 of 29.

I'm using Matlab R2017b on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation Release 6.10 (Santiago), Kernel Linux 2.6.32-754.2.1.el6.x86_64, and GNOME 2.28.2.

[dpb]

I suppose this isn't reproducible for specific searches, either, is it?

This sounds unfortunately much like one of those system-specific thingies with the combination of all the pieces including video, the browser, OS and updates thereto, drivers from every vendor, etc., etc., etc., ...

[Emily]

right, it isn't consistent for a given search, more of a random bug.

[dpb]

I'd guess the only possible way to find any relief on this will be to contact TMW support directly.

Oh, is this a new symptom that has appeared some time after initial use or is it new? That might lead to hints of some update having broken something. Or, if it has "always" had the symptom, have you checked for any ML patches and kept your system updated?

[Emily]

Thanks for your help dpb. I only recently started using the newer version of matlab. The older version didn't have this problem, but the help docs were completely different. I have submitted a service request/bug report.

[dpb]

What was the previous release you were using (curious just how old)?

Could you possibly either upgrade to R2018a or just download trial version of it to see if symptoms were to go away, perhaps?

I think should still submit SRQ to official support, though, or mayhaps you can treat this as an installation problem if it is recent upgrade.

[Emily]

I was using 2012a, which didn't have such a fancy interface for the help docs. We have a site license, not sure when we will get the newest version installed. This problem could maybe be related to the SOFTWARE OPENGL rendering? On our system we don't have some drivers that matlab relies on for graphics so it uses software rendering instead. Also, I now recall that when I started using the newer version five months ago I had trouble with the documentation loading at all, which I fixed with the command

 com.mathworks.mlwidgets.html.HtmlComponentFactory.setDefaultType('HTMLPANEL');

which I found here: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/317324-help-takes-forever-to-load-and-i-get-a-java-related-error.

Using that command again does not fix the problem I'm having now. So anyway, you are right, its probably pretty specific to my system since nobody else has chimed in here. I'll see what happens with the service folks. :)