This forum is EXTREMELY slow

Since one year sometimes it is very slow for me too. I have been accessing from Spain.

For some reason. First time ever I’m getting good response from the site. You’ll see from previously replies I was complaining of almost 2 minute delays before site rendered.

But today it’s been well under a minute. I don’t know what changed, but I much prefer it.

Same here, problem seems solved.

No improvement at all.

Yesterday, from Spain very slow

I ran another test via webpagetest.org (anyone can do this, by the way – it’s a free, public, and anonymous service). The test was run from the east coast of the USA. See https://www.webpagetest.org/result/211113_BiDcF1_bbeb8970aa292ef383ccb7338980cc2d/ . There was just one odd static asset (a PNG image) that took about a minute to download. It wasn’t blocking. Otherwise, the overall wait was only about 5 seconds! Way better.

Anecdotally, warm-cache page loads do feel way faster to me on desktop and mobile now. Very near the 5 seconds mentioned above. Cold-cache performance seems just as bad as when I originally ran speed tests ( see Help.nextcloud.com slow page load times ), though. It seems to be blocking for over a minute on several javascript files and static assets (png images). I also noticed piwik.js failed to load from stats.nextcloud.com–that may be because I use an ad blocker (Pi-hole).

Anyway, this is great progress! Thank you @just and team!

I am from India, using Fiber to home and I too face this extremely slow loading issue of this forum pages.

And back to slow for me

Hi all,

My Experience:
Day 1:
Loading the forum the first time takes ages < 30 seconds and i refresh until it works up to 2 minuits.
After the first load it is fast.
Not changing anything just log out of computer.
Day 2:
Loading the forum the first time takes ages < 30 seconds and i refresh until it works up to 2 minuits.
After the first load it is fast.
Not changing anything just log out of computer.
Day x:
Beheaviour does not change.

I got used to it I think its like that for more then 2 years.

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It is just a very slow server, I really think they do not want the community to use it :wink:
For me, TTFB (time for first byte) = 50 seconds for a simple 1.4kb PNG (not even a script)!

It’s really just a matter of putting a load balancer or even just scaling vertically the instance (more bandwidth, more CPU). It might be also as stup… woups simple as bumping up or configuring PHP pm (static). I think it’s a really bad rep for people crossing this forum when taking a decision to use nextcloud or not.

image

So the issue with the forums is kinda weird, the IP stack on the server is seriously broken around MTU/MSS handling. If you do not have a 1500 MTU capable internet connection (aka you’re on VDSL, ADSL, anything with PPPOE, etc), then you’ll have issues with the nextcloud forums.

Usually you’ll see this if your router doesn’t have clamp-mss (also know as adjust-mss) configured, and the remote site has incorrectly had ICMP completely firewalled. However in this case, the forums are also ignoring the requested MSS in the SYN packet…

Looking at a tcpdump here, I’m watching my workstation send a SYN packet with an mss of 1440. And then five packets later, the server sends back a 1500 byte packet! (an MSS of 1440 should have resulted in maximum packet sizes of 1480) My upstream router (which has a 1500 MTU and has the pppoe session from my VDSL landing on it) then sends back an ICMP Frag Needed packet (mtu 1480), the forums send back a few more 1500’s, and then finally start sending 1480 packets… Which is how things are supposed to work. Except then on the next fetch (i.e. each of the css files, jpegs, etc etc) we go through the whole rigmarole AGAIN.

This thing of it happening AGAIN should not happen - the kernel’s IP stack should be caching the MTU to the destination IP and just using it - and of course, it should be honouring the 1440 mss (1480 MTU) in the first place.

Not sure if whoever looks after the server hosting the forums is around, but if you can check that a) you’re not blocking ICMP frag needed packets, and
b) there’s no weird firewall rules set to adjust the mss of inbound packets anywhere in front of the server?

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It is not slow for everybody and not all the time. So there might be different issues and people are affected differently. There were some general problems and it was slow for everybody (many 5xx errors and some images/resources not loading and running into timeouts). Some of the things were fixed. But not for all.

I can ping help.nextcloud.com and set a MTU of 1470:
ping help.nextcloud.com -f -l 1470
I get packages of the same size back.

Oh good point, so yeah, they are actively ignoring mss in the syn packet, and the icmp frag needed packets

I am getting different results from different browsers. the site has always been really slow to initially load, but my Firefox browser has been completely failing to open the site now for a couple of months. Pages will sit on the “Loading” screen for days. Literally. Why they don’t time out, I don’t know.

I managed to get the site to load up using Chromium, though it was as usual very slow for the first page load. I’m coming from Australia, no VPN.

The issue seems to be with some of the underlying resources. Once logged in, the site seems to move between pages fairly quickly.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Forum has a lot of CSP errors

I am also located in Australia, Sydney to be precise. Ever since i started using NextCloud and accessing the forums >12 months ago, I too have noticed that the site is always slow.

I found this thread trying to find out if there was a way to resolve it as I can generally go and make a coffee before the page I want to view is accessible :slight_smile:

What is the load balancer that runs in front of it? In case its of any use I see coloured dots cycling through constantly until the page finally loads.

When I can get in front of my PC I will do some fuether tests

I also spotted something about VDSL and MSS. I am using NBN which is VDSL through a Fortigate firewall. I will see if the Fortigate can force a particular MTU when hitting this domain to see if that helps.

P.S. this is the only site / domain I have these issues with, everything else loads in seconds.

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@mackov83
Maybe you find more infos the browser developer tools (e.g. F12 and then Network).

I get sometimes blocked http objects. I use no firewall and i can load the urls directly without problems.

https://i.imgur.com/6fRVEMG.png

Maybe interesting for @tflidd

downloadable font: download failed (font-family: “Open Sans” style:normal weight:300 stretch:100 src index:2): bad URI or cross-site access not allowed source: https://nextcloud.com/wp-content/themes/nextcloud-theme/dist/fonts/OpenSansLight.ttf

(direct link works fine for me)

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@devnull yes, I always forget about the F12 option. Here are the outputs:

On initial attempts to access the site I receive the following:

After a few minutes of waiting, it seems to then timeout with the following:

Based on my limited knowledge and reading this thread, there are two distinct sites:
https://nextcloud.com - which is a WordPress site (will refer to as ‘the website’)
https://help.nextcloud.com - which is Discourse (will refer to as ‘the forum’)

By the looks of the errors, the forum is trying to access content on the website and due to CORS restrictions it is being blocked. Weirdly when it eventually times out we then get access to the site.

I guess it’s up to the NextCloud folk to take the information we have provided and look into it.

4 Likes

Ironically I have always found it seriuosly slow to point of mind-boggling that the slowest site I ever use is help.nextcloud.com. Not a mark of honor. Then yesterday it wasn’t loading at all. And so I tried a proxy, but not luck there either, so I tried Tor too and am on Tor now, the only way I can see or interact with this forum.

Lift thy game, Nextcloud! Lift thy game.

Can you share the location and the service provider? And the proxy, is this a public one and in which network?
With the TOR network, you know that you and Nextcloud have the bandwidth to have a better connection.