Hello, I just migrated to R2 and everything went perfectly. All images have the S3 CDN URL link. However, I noticed an issue: avatars are taking a long time to load. On average, it takes about 3 to 4 seconds, whether I’m clicking on a user’s avatar or looking inside a post. Is this expected?

Hey Lilly, i’m still geting the same issue. Even after the rake avatars:refresh It’s even has the same issue with /latest. I tested it cleaning the cache from my browser and from cloudflare, but no success yet. Maybe i need to wait for some time? i’m testing it in a forum with 4500 users

don’t clear your browser or cloudflare caches anymore - when you run rake avatars:refresh for that many users, it doesn’t happen instantly. but rather it puts thousands of jobs into sidekiq to process in the background, which can take several hours depending on your server’s cpu. sorry about that, i…

Ok, I think something else is going on. I have nothing in my queues. But if I click on any user’s avatar, this shows up in ‘tail -f log/production.log’: Sent file /var/www/discourse/tmp/avatar_proxy/3689d91eb5e1013beef831c585b5e62edeeecbd6.jpeg (0.2ms)

[image] David_Ghost: /var/www/discourse/tmp/avatar_proxy/3689d91eb5e1013beef831c585b5e62edeeecbd6.jpeg (0.2ms) oh wow ok. this is likely a smoking gun and points to a different issue. avatar_proxy in the logs usually means discourse is refusing to serve the avatar directly from cloudflare R2…

[image] Lilly: pick a username with a slow loading avatar u = User.find_by_username("the_selected_username") u.user_avatar.custom_upload.url the url i get shows the s3 cdn URL, and i can open the image in the browser. I will pass the S3 for now, as i dont really need it at this time. and i…

I’ve finished further testing and can confirm the issue is not related to R2. The same behavior (slow-loading avatars on posts and when clicking on a username) persists even with a properly configured AWS S3. It is also not a firewall issue, as “ufw status” confirms that the firewall is currently di…

Do you have both site and s3 CDNs configured?

Yes, i’m using both. The bucket is connected with cloudfront for the s3 cdn url, and the same for discourse cdn url For the r2 tests, i was not using discourse cdn url.

[image] David_Ghost: Yes, i’m using both. Except not on the one that doesn’t work? [image] David_Ghost: For the r2 tests, i was not using discourse cdn url. And the R2 with no discourse CDN is where you’re having trouble? I won’t pretend that I understand exactly what your issue is o…

[image] pfaffman: Again, I don’t promise that I understand and haven’t looked at the code, but a guess is that these are getting served by the Discourse CDN, and Discourse then counts on subsequent requests to pull from the CDN. I think this explains why it doesn’t work (or works slowly) on the …

Avatars take a long time to load after moving to S3-compatible R2

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Falco (Falco) July 2, 2026, 10:10pm 23

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Topic		Replies	Views
Problems with avatar uploads due to S3 changes Support	21	3662	October 17, 2018
How are avatars stored and accessed? Support	6	2057	November 18, 2016
User cannot use custom avatar with Amazon S3 Bug	41	6802	March 21, 2015
Slowness in loading Avatars on `meta.discourse.org` Bug	7	1623	December 16, 2015
Avatars lost after restore. How to get them back? Support	59	5765	May 24, 2020

Avatars take a long time to load after moving to S3-compatible R2

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