Help: Huge Page Delays

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Hello,

I am a very new user of concrete5.

I am having a problem where my Home page, and my Contact page (basically, that's all there is) are taking on average 3 or 4 seconds to return the first byte to my browser.

Now before you go blaming my host, I have a MyBB forum set up on the same host (same directory even), connecting to the same MySQL server - and it is lightning fast.

I have attempted to cache both of those pages.

I am running on IIS/Windows shared hosting. I have set up scheduled tasks to reload the Home page roughly every seven minutes, so the site should always be active.

Exactly once, I have seen my home page load very fast. I have no idea what was different.

If anyone can explain why this is happening, I would greatly appreciate it.

I'm happy to provide more information, just let me know what you need.

Thanks!

 
MrKDilkington replied on at Permalink Reply
MrKDilkington
Hi MisterAcoustic,

What is the address of your website?

I believe running concrete5 on a Windows server is known to be slower, and require more custom configuration, than running it on Linux.
MisterAcoustic replied on at Permalink Reply
Hello,

The site home page is at:

http://fabric8r.com/site

For comparison, the MyBB forum is at:

http://fabric8r.com/community

Thanks, and let me know what you think.

Edit: Both sites are secure, but apparently this board eats the 's' after 'http'.
MrKDilkington replied on at Permalink Reply
MrKDilkington
@MisterAcoustic

I ran your site through WebPagetest a few times, while not fast, it took 2ish seconds to load.
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/171121_TC_4186ae6e06f9f8153938aa0...

You will likely have to double-check your concrete5 cache settings along with other things like using GZIP, expire headers, etc.
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/171121_TC_4186ae6e06f9f8153938aa0...
MisterAcoustic replied on at Permalink Reply
@ MrKDilkington:

I can't explain why the web page test site loads so quickly. In the developer tools in my browsers, I consistently see 3 plus seconds before the first response from my site (Firefox 57 on linux at home, and Chome or Edge on Windows at work - meaning, if it's location related, the problem is on a broader scale than the distance to my office), Today, on several occasions, the time to first byte was over 6 seconds. (just checked the Contact page: 5.5 seconds delay).

Once the responses begin, the site is quite fast enough. The load time after that is typically around one second.

I can work on optimizations, but something doesn't seem right. What I don't understand is that the MyBB site has never once shown this behavior.

One final, different thing that I wanted to ask about (on the remote chance that it's a clue). Many times, the Contact page will show 404 page not found. This is not a server 404 - the page comes back with the look and feel of the site and template, but the content area says 404. Once or twice, the same thing has happened on the Home page itself.

These things are combining to make me very suspicious of concrete5, as it's the only common denominator I've identified so far.

If you know of any actions I could take within concrete5 that might change the times or the behavior to get a better idea what might be happening, I'd like to know about them.

Thank you very much for your help so far.
MrKDilkington replied on at Permalink Reply
MrKDilkington
@MisterAcoustic

I get similar results using Pingdom Website Speed Test.
http://tools.pingdom.com
MisterAcoustic replied on at Permalink Reply
Hello MrKDilkington (and anyone else),

I have new information. I don't understand what I know yet, but here goes. It does explain why I am seeing different results when loading in my browser vs going through the testing web sites.

I have a normal browser window open in Firefox 57, with many tabs, one of which is sitting on my site's home page.

I open up the developer tools. Disable Cache is selected. I select the Network tab, and press control-F5 to reload the page.

The request in that case is made directly to this full url:https://fabric8r.com/site/index.php...

I consistently see 3 to 6 or 7 seconds time to first byte back from the server.

In this scenario, I started poking around, and I noticed that in spite of the no cache setting and the control-F5 for force a full reload, the Request Headers actually contain cookie information like Cookie: CONCRETE5=d7t9g42mpa409ems5fd8cd0hem; CONCRETE5_LOGIN=1

It appears that information is being sent with the request, instead of starting fresh as I presumed it would.

If I edit the request to remove that cookie information and re-send it, or if I open a new private window and make a fresh request there, the time to first byte is hovering around 500 to 700 milliseconds. There it is - the huge delay eliminated.

In fact the problem also appears to go away if I remove only the CONCRETE5_LOGIN=1 portion of the cookie information.

Obviously, these pages don't really need that to be set (I know that there is another way to get to the admin login, even if I don't know what it is at this moment). Is there something I can do so that option will not be set in the cookie?

Also, any further information about this behavior would be appreciated.

Thanks!
MisterAcoustic replied on at Permalink Reply
Okay, I've decided this is a bug in concrete5.

There was apparently a fix about 6 months ago for "deleting CONCRETE5_LOGIN cookie on sign out not works"

I am using 8.2.1, and this problem seems to have returned. Once you log in to the admin interface, the CONCRETE5_LOGIN=1 cookie value is added, and it is not removed, seemingly ever. Logging out doesn't do it. If you open a new private window, there is no cookie, and the problem does not occur. Once you log in to the admin interface, the problem appears, and the new private window is contaminated from that point forward.

The good news is this should not be affecting normal users of my site. Which means I can generally forget about it. If I want to see the native performance of my site, I just have to clear my cookies.

Additionally though, I'm curious if this is contributing to the awful performance I see when using the admin interface. It seems like this would be a good thing to fix.

Where can I report this issue?
MrKDilkington replied on at Permalink Reply
MrKDilkington
@MisterAcoustic

You can try asking about this in the concrete5 Slack #general channel.
https://www.concrete5.org/slack...
limnotek replied on at Permalink Reply
Hello... I am able to replicate this behaviour.

My site had been working fine until Wednesday when the client advised that he could update text but it would not show on the live site. I was able to replicate this behaviour.

I tried using a guest login in Chrome and I was able to run the site normally.

I cleared the Concrete cache as well as my Chrome cache which did not resolve the issue.

Michael