It's slow to visit hosted Discourse in China

hosting
1

It’s very very slow to open hosted Discourse in China. We’d love to use the hosted version for our service if this issue could be solved. Is there any solution? Or we have to host it by self :frowning:

2

Unfortunately it is extraordinarily difficult to host anything in China.

Our CDN does have nodes vaguely in the area but I suppose it depends where you are?

image
image.png891×476 41.4 KB

4 Likes
3

I am curious, can you have a look at dev tools in chrome and see what assets are slow, is it slow after initial load?

5 Likes
4

image
image.png1611×980 215 KB

5 Likes
5

Big purple there is SSL establishment, it requires multiple round trips to US, and it appears the GFW is impacting this. Can you do one more test, visit a topic or two after loaded, and do a screenshot including the topic.

Can you try also accessing from a VPN and share the difference?

9 Likes
6

Hi Sam,

Sorry if I should have created a fresh topic for the query but this old thread seems to be the closest to what I could find searching through the meta.

We have been getting similar reports from our users in China:

https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp/issues/40058

We asked our users / moderators to report back with using a VPN and without one. Looking at the discussion in the tracker it seems that it’s something to do with the AWS CDN?

We do have a self-hosted (which we use for testing) Discourse as well which does not seem to have the slow load times.

Is there anything we can do to help fix this?

Thanks a lot for all that you all do for us.
Cheers.

7

This is a known issue that we don’t have a good solution for yet.

The CDN we currently use – and every other CDN we’ve tried – is slowed significantly by the Chinese Firewall. We have no plans to invest in infrastructure inside China, so we recommend using a VPN or proxy like Shadowsocks. As you’ve seen, sites are much more responsive thus.

Last week was an important meeting of the Chinese Communist Party on 26–29 October, and the filtering is particularly aggressive during those. That makes the performance even worse.

Things appear to be returning to “normal” (i.e. bad but not horrible) this week.

6 Likes
8

Thanks for your clarifications @schleifer.

1 Like