[Support Guide] Performance troubleshooting your Netlify site

[fool]

last reviewed by Netlify Support in Sep 2022

This article will describe our most frequent performance troubleshooting caveats and advice, for speeding up your Netlify site.

Our CDN may behave a bit differently than you or your typical benchmarking tools expect. When you say your site is slow, this is what we check on:

1. Is DNS configured correctly, to leverage our CDN? Are you proxying to us?
2. Are you using any custom caching settings? We review them and also how well your site makes use of our caching model by not changing unnecessarily many files with each deploy.
3. Check your auth. Make sure you’re not using password protection. Password protection and HTTP basic auth do not make good use of our CDN (authentication is done at the origin, not the edge). Our Identity service using JWT’s does authenticate with good performance at the edge.
4. You’re only as fast as your backend. If you proxy to another service or call functions, keep in mind that we can’t accelerate those things nor control how fast they respond.
5. Keep in mind that our CDN caches opportunistically and cache is per-node; busy sites (excluding dynamic/uncacheable content such as SSR for Next.js or Gatsby sites) are served from cache. Most locations have several nodes so you may need to reload several times to get your content cached in your nearest location when testing a new page or site.
6. Our CDN does not effectively cache large files (several megabytes). Keep things small.
7. Also keep in mind that automated performance or load testing is forbidden without specific written permission from our team by our terms of service - and we generally don’t grant that permission below the enterprise level, so if you see some sporadically slow behavior, setting up a 10,000 page load test might lead to more consistent results, but it could also lead to us turning off your service. So, please follow the guidance below instead

Still have trouble? Send us a HAR file (preferrered), or the x-nf-request-id for a slow request, and we’ll be happy to investigate.

[awxxxxxx]

Hi @fool , I’ve checked settings and still have trouble, could you help us figure out that?
The x-nf-request-id is 01G0C595SVG5YCD417A2V2VGYJ

Thanks.

[hillary]

Hey there, @awxxxxxx

Thanks for reaching out, and welcome to the Netlify Forums! Can you describe a bit more what performance issues you are experiencing? We are happy to look at the x-nf-request-id, but a brief description of what you are experiencing as well as what you have already done to troubleshoot would be beneficial to us.

Thanks!

[awxxxxxx]

Hi @hillary , thanks for your reply.

As you can see in above picture, file1 ( x-nf-request-id: 01G0MBTXJ2E0E8EEP2HSRNQZWZ) is hosted in netlify which costs 731ms to load, and file2 is hosted in other server which costs 106ms to load. That is huge gap between between two files. So can you help us figure out whether the CDN works normally on our website?

Thanks.

[hrishikesh]

Hi @awxxxxxx,

I checked that file and got the following stats:

Note that, the content download time is not totally in our control. However, TTFB to some extent, is - which seems to be 300ms consistently for that file in my tests. From our point of view, this seems normal, but is this not what you’re seeing?