Long ago and far away. And unforgettable. July 2005
New Photos
Piqued by Peter’s recent post on Core Web Vitals I decided to submit my own home page and a post to PageSpeed Insights. The results were not perfect, but perfectly satisfactory; 99, 98, etc. But there is a bigger problem behind the scenes.
Any time I change anything at all on the site -- a new post, a minor edit, major upgrades -- it becomes unreachable for about 15 minutes. The log files tell me that the maximum time allowed, which is 4 minutes, is exceeded, often 2 or 3 times a minute. Then, suddenly, the problem resolves itself. I'm really not sure even how to start troubleshooting this, because each time I change something like cache details, the enforced time-out drives me nuts.
One possibility is that there are just too many pages for Grav to handle, more than 4000 in total. Of those, ~2500 are the silly little posts I make to record the podcasts I have listened to. But honestly, why do I need to keep those data? Or at least, keep them online. It all started in May 2018, and I can't say I have made much use of the records. I like the idea of keeping a record, but maybe it would be enough to keep a rolling stock of 12 months, and shift the rest offline. That would reduce the load by more than 90% and maybe that would solve the problem. It could be worth one timeout to find out.
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Further to yesterday’s post about improving this site’s performance, one of the lead developers of Grav was able to diagnose the problem. Turns out its an unruly plugin. Disable it, and rebuilding the site takes 2–3 seconds, versus the 15 minutes I was experiencing. Trouble is, that plugin’s author is less than responsive, so I’m not inclined to raise another issue or submit another PR. The developer did suggest an alternative, which I’ll try, but for now I am going to disable the plugin before updating the site and see what difference that makes.
Later: Confirmed. The rebuild is essentially instantaneous. I wonder what will happen when I re-enable the plugin after uploading this addendum.
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