We currently experience a diminished with one of our customers at our main production site. All subpages and resources seem to be affected as well.
The customer reports a completely broken experience for themselves with the site not working correctly at all, mostly due to assets not loading correctly.
We already started investigating and have found that - so far - nothing seems to be wrong with the site itself.
Quick rundown:
The production site has a Cloudflare layer and almost all of it's assets are delivered either via CDNjs or Amazon's Cloudfront (behind Cloudflare) - all assets are reachable via HTTP as well
The site uses SSL and enforces it (the dynamic cert from Cloudflare)
We could secure a HAR from one of the requests for the request to one of our sites, the request times are extremely long. If you like to try, here is an online HAR viewer, be sure to uncheck validation of the file.
The customer uses Internet Explorer 8 and Chrome (39). While the site is not optimized for IE8. It should run fine in Chrome, in fact, in runs in most browsers above IE9 just fine for all of us.
Notes
We already ruled out:
Virtual delivery problems (there could be physical limitations we are not aware of)
General faultiness of our setup (We tried three different open VPNs to verify this)
Being on the customers blacklist by accident (although we cannot be entirely sure of this)
SSL Server name indication (SNI) problems
(Potentially) a general problem with the customers network, the customer does not report any problems with "the rest of the internet".
The customer will not give access to their VPN/disclose security details so we cannot really test for the situation ourselves. We suspect that the customer uses an internal proxy that might cause the problems described, but we are not sure.
Questions
My questions here are:
Is there any known problem caused by internal networking in conjunction with our setup that can cause this behaviour?.
Are there potential problems on our end that we could have overlooked or things that we do different from other sites?
It seems the connection is being done (or routed) through a low bandwidth high latency link (or a very congested one). Most of the dns lookups and connects seems to be taking ~10s.
In the HAR you can see that it affects fonts.googleapis.com and cdnjs.cloudflare.com. https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js has no data captured. To me the affirmation that the customer does not report any problems with "the rest of the internet" seems kind of dubious, seeing that in this HAR it hasn't been able to load the analytics js and access to usual cdns are very slow.
My guesses (pick one or more):
they are testing in a machine different than the one they have no problems with "the rest of the internet"
this machine is very, very slow
it has some kind of content filtering, antivirus, whatever filtering the web (perhaps with a ssl certificate installed in order to forge & inspect https traffic)
the access is done through a congested route, or a low bandwidth high latency link
Two hotspots:
It happens sometime for CDN points to be inconsistent, I spent a lot of time to understand this issue. How? In a live session with the client when I opened each resource loaded one by one I understand there are differences between CDN access points (Mine eastern Europe - His central Europe ). CDN hosting was one of the biggest US player in the world, anyhow we fixed this by invalidating(deleting) all files from CDN as so new/correct ones were loaded.
You need to have CDN that supports serving files over HTTPS, then use that CDN for the SSL requests.
Related
We're using Google Cloud Platform to host a WordPress site:
Google Load Balancer with CDN -> Instance Group with single VM -> Nginx + WordPress
From step 1 (only VM with WordPress, no cache) to the last step (whole setup with Load Balancer and CDN) I could progressively see the improvement when testing locally from my browser and from GTmetrix. But PageSpeed Insights always showed little improvement.
Now we're proud of an impressive 98/97 score in GTmetrix (woah!), but PSI still shows we're pretty average, specially on mobile (range from 45-55).
Problem: we're concerned about page ranking in Google so we'd like to make PSI happy as well. Also... our client won't understand that we did make an improvement while PSI still shows that score.
I was digging and found a few weird things about PSI:
When we adjusted cache-control in nginx, it was correctly detected by local browser and GTmetrix, but section Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy in PSI showed the old values for a few days.
The homepage has a background video hosted in 3 formats (mp4, webm, ogv). Clients are supposed to request only one of them (my browser and GTmetrix do), but PSI actually requests the 3 of them. I can see them in Avoid enormous network payloads section.
When a client requests our homepage, only the GET / request reaches our backend server (which is the expected behaviour) and the rest of the static assets are served from the CDN. But when testing from PSI, all requests reach our backend server. I can see them in nginx access log.
So... those 3 points are making us get a worse score in PSI (point 1 suddenly fixed itself yesterday after days since we changed cache-control), but for what I understand none of them should be happening. Is there something else I am missing?
Thanks in advance to those who can shed some light on this.
but PSI still shows we're pretty average, specially on mobile (range from 45-55).
PSI defaults to show you a mobile score on a simulated throttled connection. If you look at the desktop tab this is comparable to GT Metrix (which uses the same engine 'Lighthouse' under the hood without throttling so will give similar results on Desktop).
Sorry to tell you but the site is only average on mobile speed, test it by going to Performance tab in developer tools and enabling 'Network:Fast 3G' and 'CPU: 4x Slowdown' in the throttling options.
Plus the site seems really JavaScript computation heavy for some reason, PSI simulates a slower CPU so this is another factor. One script is taking nearly 1 second to evaluate.
Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy in PSI showed the old values for a few days.
This is far more likely to be a config issue than a PSI issue. PSI always runs from an empty cache. Perhaps the roll out across all CDNs is slow for some reason and PSI was requesting from a different CDN to you?
Videos - but PSI actually requests the 3 of them. I can see them in Avoid enormous network payloads section.
Do not confuse what you see here with what Google has used to actually run your test. This is calculated separately from all assets that it can download not based on the run data that is calculated by loading the page in a headless browser.
Also these assets are the same for desktop and mobile so it could be for some reason it is using one asset for the mobile test and one for the desktop test.
Either way it does indeed look like a bug but it will not affect your score as that is calculated in other ways.
all requests reach our backend server
Then this points to a similar problem as with point 1 - are you sure your CDN has fully deployed? Either that or you have some rule set up for a certain user agent / robots rule set up that bypasses your CDN. Most likely a robots rule needs updating.
What can you do?
double check your config, deployment etc. Ensure it has propagated to all CDN sites and that all of the DNS routing is working as expected.
Check that you don't have rules set for robots, I notice the site is 'noindex' so perhaps you do have something set up while you are testing things that is interfering.
Run an 'Audit' from Developer Tools in Google Chrome -> this uses exactly the same engine that PSI uses. This may give you better results as it uses your actual browser rather than a headless browser. Although for me this stops the videos loading at all so something strange is happening with that.
Recently our website went from http to https. I, and others, are randomly getting "The Site Can't Provide a Secure Connection" page. Upon refresh, the page loads just fine. Why are we getting this initial page randomly?
FYI... We have http to https redirects in place.
Impossible to say without more details, but some things I can suggest are:
You have multiple servers and some are configured correctly and some incorrectly.
You are not including the full certificate chain. Sometimes your browser has the missing intermediary cached and sometimes not (see this answer for more info here: https://serverfault.com/questions/826100/ca-certificate-trouble-with-squid-on-centos7/826321#826321)
A bug in browser/software. I had this issue on Chrome when using Apache HTTP/2. Never did figure it out but a Chrome update fixed it.
Run https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ on your site to confirm not a problem with your https set up and, if that doesn't work, or you don't understand the results it gives, then update your question with more details (what Server and Browser you are using and what version, if you have any proxy in place between your Browser and the site and, ideally the website name) if you want people to help you.
Also be aware this is a programming site and some people don't like these questions here and will suggest other Stack Exchange sites but honestly don't know where this question is best placed: serverfault.com maybe, but is for professional SysAdmins only, Unix and Linux seems a little generic (not even sure if you are using a Linux webserver!), Webmasters is more for content and SEO questions, Information and Security is more for theoretical SSL/TLS questions...
I have been developing a crawling script for a number of news websites and using Scrapy to handle the logic.
When I run my script on an Ubuntu web server (Digital Ocean, if that helps), a lot of the websites that return 200 on my local machine turn out to be 417 instead.
I was wondering how I should fix this, if it is a problem at all? I'm actually not quite sure if it is affecting the final output, but it seems like it has been.
Some of my own research has turned up:
http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E417.html . I've tried adding an Expect header to my requests, which hasn't worked
I've heard that it might be a problem with HTTP 1.1 vs 1.0? EDIT: Nope. Scrapy's HTTPDownloaderHandler automatically chooses 1.1 if it is available
417 is the error a web server gives you when your client says it expects content-types a,b,c, but the content that the server could deliver doesn't match any of these types.
This looks like a scrapy bug or, more likely, misconfiguration.
It seems either your public ip address was already banned or was banned while you scraped by the web server of the page you want to scrape. For the first situation you can reboot your instance to get a new public ip (at least this works on Amazon). For the second scenario, here are some tips from the official documentation to avoid this situation:
rotate your user agent from a pool of well-known ones from browsers
(google around to get a list of them)
disable cookies (see COOKIES_ENABLED) as some sites may use cookies to spot bot behaviour
use download delays (2 or higher). See DOWNLOAD_DELAY setting.
if possible, use Google cache to fetch pages, instead of hitting the
sites directly
use a pool of rotating IPs. For example, the free Tor
project or paid services like ProxyMesh
use a highly distributed downloader that circumvents bans internally, so you can just focus on parsing clean pages. One example of such downloaders is Crawlera
Additionally, you can reduce concurrent requests settings in your spider, that worked once for me.
Well the main question says it all, why are the files loaded via https. I am just adding some new libraries to the website, and noticed that the links are all https://.
Now from what I understand you use https when there is some sensitive information, and I do not think that is the case with these libraries I guess. I think nobody is interested in getting the content of these files.
Is there any explanation for this ?
People asked for it so they could use the libraries on things like e-commerce sites, which eventually require an SSL connection. They provide links to the https version by default to make it easier for everyone overall (automatically avoids mixed-content warnings), and for most people the slight performance cost won't matter. But if you know you won't have any need for it, just strip it down to a regular http connection:
https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js
They did actually publish the http URLs at one point, but I'd imagine that the resulting mixed-content warnings etc that came about as a result of people adding SSL connections and not thinking it through just created a bunch of support questions, so it was simpler to default to showing https and let people hack it if they really wanted.
I have bought a ipad website and it's moved to my server.
Now i have tried to make an addon domain, but it does not work on my first hosting account.
On my second hosting account it works, but on that server there is another ipad website so i don't think this is smart to do because of the same ip adresses.
So adding an addon domain does not work and the site is down now!
I have added a service ticket, but i think this will cost at least 8 hours before i get an answer.
Can anyone tell me how bad this is for my serp position in google.
The website has always been on the first page.
Will this 404 error do bad to my site?cOr is it better to place the site on the same server as the other ipad website?
EDIT:
It is not ideal to serve a 404/timeouts, however your rankings should recover. You mentioned that the sites are different. Moving the site to a different server/IP shouldn't matter too much as long as you can minimize the down time of the said process performed (and should probably be preferred over downtime, if possible). I want to ensure this is communicated, but do NOT show site #2 as site #1 in the short term as you will experience duplicate content issues.
If you don't already have it, you might open up a Google Webmaster Tools account. It will provide you with some diagnostics about your outage (e.g. how many attempts Google tried, the returned response codes, etc..) and if something major happens, which is unlikely, you can request re-inclusion.
I believe it is very bad if the 404 is a result of an internal link.
I cannot tell you anything about which server you should host it on though, as i have no idea if that scenario is bad. Could you possibly host it on the one server, then when the next is up, host it from there?