Is this website slow?

[xyz]

Well, something really strange is going on.

I use Firefox 27.0.1.

I have several add-ons, one of which is Flagfox 5.0.0. Flagfox displays a small replica of a flag _of the country that the website is in_. Hover your mouse over the flag and Flagfox shows more information.

The flag that is shown when I am on http://www.cpaptalk.com is:
Costa Rica!

I just did a test visiting websites in Canada, Mexico, and Britain. In each case, Flagfox displayed the correct flag.

Anyone else who uses Firefox, please get the Flagfox add-on and see what it displays for you.

For another test, I went to I just went to https://www.cpap.com. It shows the flag of the U.S.

I closed the browser, deleted all history, cookies, etc, ran ccleaner, and ran quick scans of two virus checkers (Norton Internet Security and MalwareBytes). No problems, of course.

Opened Firefox, went to cpaptalk.com, and got the Costa Rica flag again.

So ... what's happening and why?

[Bama Rambler]

The hosting site is in Costa Rica. There's nothing wrong with that and you'd probably be surprised how many popular websites are hosted offshore.

That in itself doesn't have anything to do with the speed of the site.

[SleepingUgly]

It's good now! Thanks!

[johnnygoodman]

Howdy,

There's our server, which runs cpaptalk software and a database. And then there's CloudFlare, a security layer and a content distribution network (CDN).

It looks like this:

Your Request for a CPAPtalk page> CloudFlare > CPAPtalk Server

You talk to CloudFlare through your nearest internet service provider endpoint and with any luck, there's a cached copy of the CPAPtalk page you want on that end point. If so, it serves that instead of going back to server for it, unless that caches time to live has expired, in which case it queries the server.

The net results of this should be increased speed, availability and security. Sometimes though, it can mean weirdness on pings (see Costa Rica) or frustrating routing and downtime when Cloudflare is having its own trouble scaling.

Is CPAPtalk slow due to CloudFlare? No. It is slow because we're running on a custom modded phpBB instance with less than fully indexed/optimized db queries/tables and our traffic and user base is growing.

But, I thought I'd explain both parts.

We're still going through and optimizing the queries that stick out. I hope to see some incremental gains in the next few days.

Johnny

[squid13]

It's back to being extremely slow again.

[CapnLoki]

And its fast for me ...

[Pugsy]

Intermittent response time for me..sometimes quick and sometimes slow and sometimes horribly slow...has been that way since last night. Prior to last night...horribly slow.
For now the "slow" is still improved over "horribly slow"

[xyz]

jg:
> There's our server, which runs cpaptalk software and a database.
> And then there's CloudFlare, a _security layer_
...
> it can mean _weirdness on pings (see Costa Rica)_

Is that "weirdness" true or false?
Is the cpaptalk server hosted in Costa Rica or not?
If yes, why?

Flagfox appears to show the correct country for all the other websites that I have noticed.

[johnnygoodman]

Howdy,

We currently host CPAPtalk on a dedicated server run by Rackspace. I believe it is out of their Dallas data center.

CloudFlare is going to deliver from which ever CDN end point they deem most efficient at the time. That could be Costa Rica. I suspect this is a bug or issue with the firefox plug in though. IP resolutions aren't always accurate.

Johnny

[johnnygoodman]

Howdy,

We've made adjustments to our server which allow each request to be allocated additional processing power.

The net effect should be faster load times.

Johnny

[herefishy]

Seems fine - thanks for your attention to this matter.