REALLY slow initial page load

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#1

Hi all,

Hoping someone can just give me some ideas of what to look for here:

It’s a Remix site. The situation is that everyone who accesses it the first time sees a VERY long load time, on the order of 10 or more seconds.

The site itself is a simple splash page. After initial access it’s very snappy. This seems to affect each individual user. I.e., if I access it the first time, 10 seconds. Then fast. But, if I ask my roommate to do it, same thing… s l o w response and then fast on reload. Ask someone else, same thing. All within seconds of each other.

Now, I’ve cleared cache after it loads the first time, and it STILL loads fast. That leads me to believe that it’s on the Netlify CDN. Like it’s cache missing for each initial load? Still, 10 seconds? Wondering if that’s some sort of Remix edge function warm-up thing, and my users are all just hitting different end points.

So, two questions… is that it? Combo cache miss, edge function warm-up? If so, any ideas how to prevent such a thing, aside from not using Remix?

Thanks!

#2

Hey @crustyratfink,

I loaded your website on a blank browser and for the first time on my device altogether. It loaded for me with a TTFB of 1.2 seconds.

Are you still having slow loads? If yes, could you share the HAR File recording?

#3

Sort of grasping at straws here, but signing up for Pingdom and hitting it once a minute seems to “fix” it. Your experience validates that.

Given some time, I’ll try to shut that off and record some timings.

#4

Sounds reasonable - I’d expect pingdom to keep the cache on all CDN nodes primed for your site, so your approach to finding the slowness without it sounds reasonable! If you can manage to reproduce and grab a HAR file (HAR Analyzer), that would be most actionable for us!