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?

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 …

Do they not have Discourse CDNs? If they don’t, I’m wrong. If they do, then it may be that not having a Discourse CDN (when you have an s3 bucket?) causes this issue. But it seems weird that avatars would behave differently with S3 than without it.

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

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David_Ghost July 4, 2026, 7:00am 25

Hello,

Still nothing today. But i just saw that errors in the /admin/users. Maybe something is rate limiting me? sometimes it’s a 504 error:

Topic		Replies	Views
Problems with avatar uploads due to S3 changes Support	21	3668	October 17, 2018
How are avatars stored and accessed? Support	6	2059	November 18, 2016
Slowness in loading Avatars on `meta.discourse.org` Bug	7	1625	December 16, 2015
User cannot use custom avatar with Amazon S3 Bug	41	6806	March 21, 2015
Avatars lost after restore. How to get them back? Support	59	5810	May 24, 2020

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

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