I have been trying to find ways to speed up the load time of my site, so I have turned to CloudFlare to see if I can improve my load time.
My site is thelocalgolfer.com and I host it with hostmonster. I took three consecutive gtMetrix tests w/o cloudflare enabled and then enabled cloudflare ran three
consecutive gtMetrix tests w/ cloudflare enabled. You will see that with
cloudflare enabled it takes on average 21 seconds of wait time on the initial load. I have spent hours on the phone with hostmonster tech support trying to troubleshoot the problem and they said they have exhausted all options on their side.
Also to note when cloudflare is enabled one of the errors I have been
getting is
Error : cURL error 6: Resolving host timed out: www.thelocalgolfer.com
in the middle of the page after the page loads. The page still takes about 21 seconds
Try it yourself I still have it enabled (for now).
Here are the gtmetrix results with CloudFlare enabled:
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.thelocalgolfer.com/C3Yv7xNW
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.thelocalgolfer.com/Y35wcjzO
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.thelocalgolfer.com/x82tUdhH
Without Cloudflare enabled:
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.thelocalgolfer.com/NevlWuVV
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.thelocalgolfer.com/GDiEPUnG
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.thelocalgolfer.com/CcuvxYdq
By the way I have gone back and forth with CloudFlare and they have been less than helpful, they tell me to tweak this option or that option, and they take 24-48 hours to respond.
I am hoping that someone has experience with this issue and can help me out!
Thanks,
Neil
I actually posted some information in your support ticket relative to the issue. Doing a curl against the www record, with no CloudFlare in the middle, is returning a very large response time.
So for anyone that runs in to a similar problem, I was running simplepie on my site which was causing a loopback situation where the page was calling an RSS feed on the same domain.
Related
I have a VB.NET/Vue website hosted on an internal IIS 8.5 Windows 2012R2 Server. Our company has about 30 users using the site at any given time. The users are experiencing random delays throughout the day and on some days there's no delays (site works great most of the time). What I'm looking for is any suggestions on where to start looking to solve the issue. Here's what I've found so far.
User goes to site and initiates an api request from the UI
User sees a loading icon for anywhere up to a minute or so while the request returns
The request eventually reaches the server after some time and executes really fast within milliseconds and returns the response to the user
By this time, many users have already refreshed the page making new requests that succeed on page load. For the users that are patient and wait for the response, it eventually returns the response.
Here's some screenshots:
So to sum everything up, there are several users experiencing delays on a daily basis.
Some days we don’t have any delays, but most days we have several users experiencing multiple delays of several seconds to 30 seconds to 1 minute.
I’ve found all this using LogRocket and NewRelic and what is happening is all these requests are completing within milliseconds, but the request doesn’t seem to reach the server for some period of time.
I’ve been monitoring the CPU/Memory/Network on these servers and it all seems fine to me during when these issues occur.
It seems that the problem lies between the users computer and whatever hardware/software exists before reaching the web server.
Update here... Found that the problem is occurring on the users computer in all these instances. Using google chrome's performance api, I was able to track timing info for these requests and found that the problem is in the fetchStart. So whatever is happening here is the cause of the issue.
Example below:
entryType: resource
startTime: 1119531.820000033
duration: 56882.43999995757
initiatorType: xmlhttprequest
nextHopProtocol: http/1.1
workerStart: 0
redirectStart: 0
redirectEnd: 0
fetchStart: 1119531.820000033
domainLookupStart: 1176401.0199999902
domainLookupEnd: 1176402.2699999623
connectStart: 1176402.2699999623
connectEnd: 1176404.8350000521
secureConnectionStart: 1176403.6700000288
requestStart: 1176404.8549999716
responseStart: 1176413.5300000198
responseEnd: 1176414.2599999905
transferSize: 15145
encodedBodySize: 14884
decodedBodySize: 14884
serverTiming: []
workerTiming: []
fetchStart is at 1119531.820000033, then requestStart is at 1176404.8549999716 so the problem is something between fetchStart and requestStart. Still looking into what is causing this.
In 2022, we are experiencing something very similar with a small fraction of our customers. There is a significant gap between the timing api requestStart and the startTime. This gap can be up to 8 minutes -- I admire the patience of customers waiting that long. The wait periods are also close to multiples of a minute.
In our case, it appears that there is a (transparent?) proxy between those browsers and our server infrastructure which appears to be triggering the problem. In particular, it forces a downgrade of HTTP/2 to HTTP/1.1. Whitelisting our website in that proxy does solve the problem. This isn't a very satisfactory solution, but it does make the customer happier!
[UPDATE]
In our case, it turned out that we were sending a Content-Length header with a non-zero value on a 304 response. This is technically invalid and it caused problems with the proxy. This happened because of the Django CommonMiddleware which always puts a content-length header on responses. The solution was to add a new piece of middleware that strips out the content-length (and content) on a 304 response.
It turned out that the content was already being stripped by our nginx frontend, but it is better not to generate it in the first place.
And what was the content? -- in our case, it was the 4 characters 'null'!
When I check (https://www.readonlinenewspaper.com) site speed using PageSpeed Insights.
I am not able to see and results and get an error message like below:
Lighthouse returned an error: FAILED_DOCUMENT_REQUEST. Lighthouse was unable to reliably load the page you requested. Make sure you are testing the correct URL and that the server is properly responding to all requests. (Details: net::ERR_CONNECTION_FAILED)
It is probably caused by one of two things
1. The site just takes too long to load.
Your page takes well over 40 seconds to load (on a high speed desktop connection, albeit in the UK and I am guessing this is somewhere else due to the long delay on requests.) so Page Speed Insights thinks it is broken as the page never completes loading within its timeout period.
Your country flags are the main cause of this, you should instead consider a CSS image sprite, or inline SVGs as the total of 438 requests on your page is so high you will never get good performance (generally only 8 requests can be made at once so that means you have over 50 round trips to your server for resources.)
If each set of eight resources takes 200ms to complete that is 10 seconds of latency (dead time waiting for a response) on its own, for me they were taking 800 to 1000 ms each!
This is particularly slow so perhaps there is something wrong with your hosting configuration or website setup? (You aren't storing the flag URLs in the database and looking them up one at a time in a loop by any chance are you?).
2. Hotjar
For some reason Page Speed Insights doesn't seem to play well with hotjar.
It is something to do with websockets but I never got to the bottom of it I just know that this is a problem I see often when people use hotjar and it is related to web sockets (maybe something to do with the wss:// protocol or their implementation).
Try disabling hotjar and run the test and see if it works then (perhaps test on another page when investigating this as it is only the homepage that is unbearably slow to load because of the flags as per point one).
p.s. the resource online-newspapers-banner-02.jpg is not being loaded over HTTPS so fix that, nothing to do with your question I just noticed the site was showing as "not secure" and I think that is the cause.
We are using a wordpress setup with hosting on Google Cloud and Cloudflare.
In Cloudflare we are using the page cache feature which should help to decrease the TTFB substantially. What it basically does is to cache every static page and serves it to the client directly. What makes me wonder is that if I make a request in the morning the TTFB is like over 1 second. All requests after that the TTFB reduces to 70ms. That is a lot. It almost feels like a browser cache when I visit a website for the second time. But after some time the TTFB spikes again to over 1 second, almost as if Cloudflare drops the cache. That's why we additionally added the EDGE Cache TTL Time of 1 month, but still. I have those daily spikes and I think every user has a TTFB over 1 second when visiting our site for the first time.
Any guesses why this is so random?
This is the guide directly from cloudflare about the page cache:
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/236166048-Caching-Static-HTML-with-WordPress-WooCommerce
Appreciate your help
I believe Cloudflare doesn't cache universally, meaning that one retrieval for a cached static resource does not cache a copy on all cloudflare servers. In fact, I believe that cloudflare caches ray-wide in its caching implementation. It seems that the "1 second" TTFB is probably Cloudflare retrieving from your origin server and caching the result because it hasn't cached it for that ray yet.
Regardless of the above, it seems that the "1 second" TTFB is probably Cloudflare retrieving from your origin server and caching the result. To confirm this you can look at the response and there will be a CF-Cache-Status header that indicates HIT or MISS. You will probably see that it is always MISS for the 1 second+ requests. You should also see another header called CF-Ray that looks something like 5abb86fb2d6c9bc1-SJC where the SJC is the data center code. You should verify that this is a datacenter that is located geographically close to you to make sure that your DNS is set up correctly to get a nearby cloudflare server per the site list here: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
Google Pagespeed: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsuper-zava.co.il%2F
My URL: https://super-zava.co.il/
I talked to my host support (BlueHost) and they told me that the problem is not related to their server. I didn't touch anything.
It seems like it is related to your ISP.
The problem seems to be related with the time that Google's services is taking to fetch the page, so it's either Google's fault or your ISP's, as mentioned above. Google's saying the first request took ~ 5 seconds for them (with the first byte taking around ~0,35 to be received).
The page loads just fine here, perhaps they have changed Google's IP priority.
I reckon it's not because of you or your site.
From me, the latency to your server is around 158 ms, and is taking around 1 second to load the page.
What you can do is to put your site behind a WAF like Cloudflare.
as reported past week on pagespeed insights discuss google groups:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pagespeed-insights-discuss/luQUtDOnoik
it seems that this is a problem (or a change in programming api) of PageSpeed Insights web itself
This may be the most mysterious problem I've ever encountered.
We have an IIS7 install with 3 Web Sites on it, each with it's own Application Pool. Once a day, for about an hour, a specific one of them goes down.
What I mean by "goes down" is:
It stops responding to requests for dynamic pages (ex. default.aspx) but will serve static files fine (logo.png).
Wireshark tells me that these dynamic page requests are actually return HTTP 500 Internal Server errors, but in the browser, I don't see an error. I just see the browser spinning.
If I log on locally to the box and surf around everything runs fine. All the pages pull up, so the database is being queried. It all seems perfectly normal.
There are no errors in the event log.
There are no errors recorded that have been captured by our internal (Application-level) error logging.
The basic IIS log file, which I thought logged every request, shows no record of these requests coming in.
And, if I restart the App Pool for the Web Site, everything comes back immediately. Or, if I just wait an hour or so, it comes back.
So, I've ruled out:
DNS issues, since I have no problem terminal servicing into the box by hostname.
Database issues, since the site works fine when I'm local to the box and surfing around
HTTP firewall issues, since I'm seeing the requests in wireshark, and am even getting images to serve up.
I have to assume it's a problem with my application, but IIS doesn't even show that these requests ever happened, and nothing in IIS or my app is logging errors.
It also doesn't even go down at the same time each day. This started at night (#midnight) and seems that it's gradually started moving it's daily time by an hour or so, until the point now where it hit at 9AM.
Any clues you might have for further troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated.
Tom
I'd fire up performance monitor and look for requests and exceptions being thrown. Not a whole lot of value in my answer but it might started pointing you in the right direction.
Actually, check the event logs first, see if something is throwing errors. Also, check memory usage and paging.