Is anyone having connection issues with this site?

[Scruff]

For several weeks now, I am constantly having pages here just show "connecting..." and taking an age to load. This is becoming more and more regular and persists for a while before pages start loading normally again. Quite frankly, the site is becoming more and more unusable as time goes on.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

 

[Atticus]

Yep... I've noticed it a fair bit more of late... Keep thinking it's my wifi or Internet connection... change to 4G & still the same

 

[Scruff]

It's definately a problem with this site and these days it's happening several times an hour. It's getting worse and worse.
Over the last few days, I've been opening up other sites immediately when the problem happens and they all load normally, so it's not anything at my end.
I'm betting it's that CloudFlare rubbish that's causing all the problems. I've seen similar issues with other sites that use it too.

 

[Scruff]

Bloody hell - now I'm getting CloudFlare boxes popping up saying "connection timed out" while I'm typing a post.

This is beyond a joke now.

 

[Atticus]

I've been opening up other sites immediately when the problem happens and they all load normally, so it's not anything at my end.

Same here.... Haven't had the timed out message as yet

 

[lawanswers]

Apologies, I have escalated to Cloudflare and will keep you updated.

 

[lawanswers]

@Scruff and @Atticus - I have purged all caches in CloudFlare, etc. This means that it may be temporarily (next 1-2 hours) a bit slower than normal to access - but hopefully it resolves the Cloudflare CDN speed issues.

 

[Scruff]

@lawanswers - Still happening. Just opened the Commercial Law forum from the home page and the browser was stuck trying to connect for over 40 seconds (6:21PM). This page then loaded straight away.

I think you need to look at the DNS settings. I just looked them up at MxToolbox and the TTL (Time To Live) setting is 30 seconds - that's way too short. It should be at least 5 minutes. If your server has a static IP address (which it should), then there's no reason for a TTL of under 1 hour, in fact, I recommend 24 hours to reduce DNS server load.

A TTL of 30 seconds is causing way too many DNS lookups and it appears that the DNS servers are choking on it. I think this is what's causing the connection problems.

(FYI - I have several I.T. qualifications, including Networking.)

 

[lawanswers]

Hi @Scruff - Yes, I understand 5 minutes/300 seconds is a common setting. 30 seconds is set by Cloudflare. Have escalated again to their support. Thank you for your patience.

 

[lawanswers]

Hi @Scruff - I've just received an update from Cloudflare (almost one month - despite LawAnswers.com.au using Cloudflare's paid service):

Hello there,
Thank you for your patience.
Just wanted to check in and let you know engineering has resolved the issue.
Could you please confirm this on your end?
Kind regards,
Todd

Looks better on my end - Network Tools: DNS,IP,Email