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?

hmmm, i suspect it could be one of 3 different issues, but the most likely to me is on-the-fly resizing. 1. on-the-fly avatar resizing when you migrated your uploads to R2, it moved the original images; however, discourse uses many different sizes of avatars (eg 45px for posts, 120px for the user …

Thank you for your quick response. I think I had already tried the ‘rake avatars:refresh’ before, but I’m not absolutely sure. What used to work for me to see the avatar open immediately was clicking on it a first time; on the second time, it would open instantly. But that’s probably due to caching…

[image] David_Ghost: What used to work for me to see the avatar open immediately was clicking on it a first time; on the second time, it would open instantly. But that’s probably due to caching. Also, I just tested your second tip and it returns a “HTTP/2 301”, with several other lines’. Same th…

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…

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

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Lilly (Lillian ) June 22, 2026, 8:44pm 4

yea given your reply, i am almost certain it is issue #1 because the curl command results for cloudflare and gravatar appear to be as expected. give rake avatars:refresh a try whenever it is convenient for you and let me know if it works.

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Slowness in loading Avatars on `meta.discourse.org` Bug	7	1609	December 16, 2015
Problems with avatar uploads due to S3 changes Support	21	3648	October 17, 2018
How are avatars stored and accessed? Support	6	2046	November 18, 2016
Avatars became default after 2.2 beta upgrade - due to regression in azure blob plugin Support	19	1607	January 10, 2019
User avatars not in S3 but served via discourse_cdn_url Development	2	532	August 14, 2020

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

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