The issue you are facing:
Community discourse instance can not be opened from Australia, or takes minutes to load.
If accessed from the main page https://help.nextcloud.com/ then it can hardly be opened even after several minutes it is still loading with five dots.
No adblock is turned on for this site.
If luck, sometimes the website can be opened within like 10 seconds or so, so I can register and post this. But most of the time it can not be opened.
I donāt see any waf challenge. Only thing showing is the five dots and takes many minutes still can not be opened.
Tried to open it through digital ocean vps in sydney , same result.
Browser is Chrome /Firefox /edge.
More test:
broadband with google/cloudflare dns, can not open;
vpn into digital oceanās sydney vps ip+cloudlare dns, can not open.
mobile network: fast access no issue.
vpn into europe country: fast access no issue.
@prefix3826 I moved your port into this thread as it seems to be same issue as the one from @tetra
It looks general performance of the forum improved and users in Europe donāt hit many issues anymore. As accessing the forum works through VPN and mobile it must be related to network - I have no idea what could be special in Australia but it looks the issue affects many/multiple users.
additionally it is very uncommon latency jumps 240ms on one hop within network of one provider - from the hostname sounds itās still in AU - and this 240ms are 4 times more then the remaining ālongā way to Europe which add āonlyā 50ms - this should not happen - one would expect latency to increase when going overseas but not even such huge differenceā¦ I would ask your provider if they can double check this hopā¦
VPN into Singapore also no issue, loads in 2 seconds.
Itās just my broadband almost never opens the website. But what about I donāt have any issue with nextcloud.com or any other website?
Only the combination of my broadband + the help.nextcloud.com forum together causing issue.
Ane read from this thread, it seems not only users from Australia, there are other users from other countires also have similar issue.
So Iād think the server/site configration with some kind of broadband structure/configaration together caused the issue. It is not limited to some particular broadband provider in Australia.
For the big latency jumps, yes it looks like it is within the same cityās two points. Usual ping between two computers should be less than 10ms within the city, and ping from Brisbane to Sydney should be less than 20ms, but those are out of the userās reach.
I think it might be related to the CDN service the site is using.
After the .js and .css has been loaded and cached on local disk/memory, then
opening the homepage or link wonāt be a problem any more.
(I have to first load the js and css via vpn link, then exit vpn works).
If I try to load via incogniziton window or clear cache, then it wonāt work anymore.
I am in Singapore. I have different experience for help.nextcloud.com in different days.
And same as apps.nextcloud.com, looks it is not a CDN related issue as I never clear my cache, but I hit multiple times in a week it took more than 10s to open help.nextcloud.com threads or got timeout to load the app list from apps.nextcloud.com. After a while, it become faster again.
In theory we have to check the way back as well. For you it is just the routing from your home to help.nextcloud.com, but the data are sent from help.nextcloud.com to your ip that might take a different route.
It can happen that between the networks (peering), sometimes the connections are saturated. In theory, they should manage to handle this, taking different routes and upgrading peering connections.
Another problem is that within each operator, they can prioritize/filter packages with criteria unknown to public.
Will you try curl -o /dev/null --compressed https://help.nextcloud.com/assets/foo and share the result?
Get the actual URL from the browserās developer tools window, under network. Sort by size and choose the largest asset/resource/file (typically the Discourse Javascript). This is a straightforward repeatable test Iāve been doing for a while now. It is nicely constrained test. It is reliably slow when I am at home and reliably fast most other places I try it.
Hereās a slow example, from just now:
$ resource_url="https://help.nextcloud.com/assets/discourse-fa0bebf654588c3e45c7d642211b1a3a7f39649c44fec50bcbf3317afdb6b976.js"
$ curl -o /dev/null --compressed "$resource_url"
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 508k 100 508k 0 0 9617 0 0:00:54 0:00:54 --:--:-- 10344
10KB/s is relatively quite slow.
For your test, if it stalls for you at the beginning (or doesnāt download), thatās useful to know too. Youāll feel that during normal forum use.
It might make a difference, yes. Iāve seen fast IPv6 connectivity and very slow IPv4 connectivity. So would be good to know if thatās the same difference for you (IPv4 slow at home, but IPv6 fast on the road)
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 508k 100 508k 0 0 7436 0 0:01:10 0:01:09 0:00:01 9885
Average speed 7.4KB
IPV4
And refresh page without reloading assets, the page dom content loads in 25 seconds
Sorry, IPv6 newbie here. Can you walk me through this?
Looks like I am using only IPv4 on my desktop and IPv6 is disabled. My phone seems to use IPv6 too, and sometimes the forum is fast on my phone (in a mobile web browser).
Is there an easy way to test? I tried turning on IPv6 then doing time curl --ipv6 --compressed -o /dev/null https://help.nextcloud.com/assets/discourse-XYZ.js (using a real value for XYZ) but it just says curl: (7) Couldn't connect to server.
If it is disabled, the curl wonāt work if you force ipv6. If your provider supports it, it is perhaps enough to just enable it in your system. Sometimes you need to enable it in your router or some web-interface from your ISP. Check first, if your ISP supports ipv6.
Besides what @tflidd said, you could try to create a access point from your mobile device to use the LTE connection (that usually does support IPv6) and then do a test with IPv6 (default then) and force IPv4 to compare the results.
$ curl -6 -o /dev/null --compressed https://help.nextcloud.com/assets/$jsfile
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 510k 100 510k 0 0 122k 0 0:00:04 0:00:04 --:--:-- 122k
$ curl -4 -o /dev/null --compressed https://help.nextcloud.com/assets/$jsfile
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 510k 100 510k 0 0 177k 0 0:00:02 0:00:02 --:--:-- 177k
Both are plenty fast.
So this is over T-Mobile USA, and I recall it usually is fast over this connection / ISP.
My home network ISP is CenturyLink fiber. Thatās where I can get the slow file download issue to repro. Most everything is fast from home except this particular discourse forum.
