Very slow home page

The home page of the site seems to have an issue, some 20 seconds of wait before displaying the page.
I also noticed that the “Recent changes in Gitlab” is not up-to-date: latest is 21 September, but the latest merge was 3 days ago.

I’ve been seeing the same for the home page for a few days now, although the forum pages are very responsive. I always go to the home page first to log in to the forum so that I can check for any updates and news.

The XML feeds for both news and GitLab feeds are the reason, but not the actual cause. The problem is the actual HTTPS fetch within Ruby itself, which has suddenly started taking 10 seconds of pure wait time before just completing normally. The 20-and-a-bit second Home page load time was caused the two feeds each sequentially causing a 10 second wait time.

We have altered nothing on the site and the two feeds both fetch normally in a web browser on the same URL as used in the CMS. I have to assume wider network configuration or environment issues on the host for now and am checking with the maintainer for any insights. In the mean time I’ve simply removed the two feeds from the home page and left placeholder text there, so that the Home page responds quickly again.

…and in fact this is now fixed already. It was traced to an old fallback name server lookup to a service that GoDaddy appears to have just recently fully retired, leading to a ~10 second timeout on that lookup.

Soon to be a “Who, me?” in El Reg. ;)

It was traced to an old fallback name server lookup to a service that GoDaddy appears to have just recently fully retired

I wonder how much would break if 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 went off-line.