Keep Alive With SSL

[Ryan Nielson]

So, I've been experimenting with HTTPD Keep Alive and SSL, which I just setup a day or two ago. SSL slowed my site down by 2 seconds, so I've been trying to improve on that. Cloudflare uses SDPY 3.1, but I also tried enabling HTTP KeepAlive. The result was failure of the page to load, or dramatically increased load times due to css not loading in the correct order. Has anyone else got KeepAlive to work with SSL? How about also using CloudFlare?

https://webforscher.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/domain-sharding-and-ssl/

 

[WSWD]

What are you using to test the speed? A lot of the speed tests out there (like Pingdom) are so ridiculously overloaded that there can be a 10+ second difference between one test and the next, on the same website. Is it noticeably slower on your browser or others peoples' browsers when you open the SSL page? All the testing I've done, without CloudFlare, or any other silly nonsense to interfere, is that there is less than 2/10 of a second difference max, for a xF forum...usually less than 1/10.

 

[Ryan Nielson]

What are you using to test the speed? A lot of the speed tests out there (like Pingdom) are so ridiculously overloaded that there can be a 10+ second difference between one test and the next, on the same website. Is it noticeably slower on your browser or others peoples' browsers when you open the SSL page? All the testing I've done, without CloudFlare, or any other silly nonsense to interfere, is that there is less than 2/10 of a second difference max, for a xF forum...usually less than 1/10.

It was causing a noticeable delay for me, on the order of 50 seconds. I had to disable it because the site became unusable. I used the browser consol to identify that the slowness was a result of CSS files failing to load. Maybe this was because I also run the Google page speed mod and minify the CSS. It could also be an interference with Cloudflare.

 

[WSWD]

Holy cow! Yeah...50 seconds is definitely not good. Keepalives should help with some of this, at least. What happens if you access your site outside of Cloudflare, out of curiosity? Do you still see the big delays?

 

[Ryan Nielson]

Holy cow! Yeah...50 seconds is definitely not good. Keepalives should help with some of this, at least. What happens if you access your site outside of Cloudflare, out of curiosity? Do you still see the big delays?

Before I moved to Cloudflare with SSL, I used to load at <3 seconds. I adopted SSL in preparation for html 2. I now load at about 4 sec. I haven't tried without Cloudflare because I'm using their SSL service with a self signed cert. I would need to get a validated cert first to try that out.

 

[rdn]

I adopted SSL in preparation for html 2

I guess you mean HTTP/2?

 

[Ryan Nielson]

I guess you mean HTTP/2?

Typo... Yes

 

[Ryan Nielson]

Holy cow! Yeah...50 seconds is definitely not good. Keepalives should help with some of this, at least. What happens if you access your site outside of Cloudflare, out of curiosity? Do you still see the big delays?

I opted to ditch SSL for now. I'll take another look once HTTP 2 is adopted. Thanks for the help troubleshooting though.

 

[WSWD]

Sounds good, and you're welcome!