Graphic pages intermittently won't load or are slow to load

[ghing]

@brmayes reports:

I logged onto the vpn to check some things on the intranet, and tried to use dg but it wouldn't load at all. logged out of the vpn as a "might as well try" situation and then dg worked perfectly 🙃

[ghing]

I believe I've also experienced this as well, though it never occurred to me that the problem was the VPN. I'll try to replicate explicitly.

[ghing]

I tried this from within the office and wasn't able to replicate it, but it's possible that the VPN works differently from inside the NPR network. I'll try this out of the office later this afternoon.

[ghing]

@brmayes said she tried replicating on a different network (but still one outside of NPR, using VPN) and wasn't able to reproduce this. She tried both using localhost and 127.0.0.1 in the domains and neither caused a problem.

I'm probably going to change the title of this issue to reflect that this no longer seems to be clearly tied to the VPN.

[brmayes]

Tested again on my home network while using the VPN. The same problem is occurring. localhost will load after about two minutes of waiting. 127.0.0.1 acts similarly. After I turn off the VPN, both work perfectly fine.

[ghing]

Do you know what Internet provider you're using on your home network? And what WiFi router?

[alykat]

I've also noticed this on occasion both at home and in the office. I didn't connect the poor performance with the VPN before, but I did notice it last night from home when I had the VPN turned on and it seemed to resolve itself when I turned the VPN off. (ISP: Comcast, with an Apple Airport Extreme router.)

Sometimes restarting the webserver or dropping the Google Spreadsheet ?refresh=1 flag also helps. And sometimes it eventually resolves itself on its own. In my Network console in Chrome, I sometimes can see (only after the whole page loads) that a file (not always the same file) stalled at some point in the loading process, holding everything up.

[alykat]

Seeing this again today. I was trying to add the embed code for a graphic to a story in Seamus. On localhost, the graphic prri-approval-20171204 took an excessively long time to load while I was on VPN — to the point where I gave up on waiting for it and loaded the published graphic URL instead to grab the embed code. (I did not experience any trouble loading the published graphic.) When I turned off VPN, the localhost version of the graphic loaded with no trouble.

Later in the day, I noted a very long lag while on VPN when generating the copyedit note. I didn't note this same lag when off the VPN.

ISP: Comcast, with an Apple Airport Extreme router.

[jjelosua]

@alykat @brmayes tried to reproduce this at home and at a coffee and could not replicate the issue....if anybody runs into this again we should take a look at the network tab and figure out if a file is stucked....as Aly suggested or maybe wireshark to check if there's something weird with VPN traffic that we should take into account