Question

Droplet randomly takes significantly longer than normal to send responses to requests.

My droplet (Basic / 2 GB / 2 vCPUs | Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS) will ocationally reply to a web request incredibly slowly (static file). This happens on my normal nginx configuration with SSL, and in a test clean configuration of both nginx and Apache2 (no SSL), which I tested in clean lxd containers with the default config for both. This occurs in both Chrome and Firefox, the two browsers I checked it on. CPU, memory, and disk both do not appear to be maxed, with the highest CPU recorded being ~2%. My droplet is in region NY3.

Most requests work fine, but seemingly at random a request will take significantly longer for the entire duration of the request, not speeding up as other connections finish. In Chrome’s network panel, this time is listed as “Downloading Content”.

An example of request timing (from Chrome’s network panel):

Size Time
4.3 kB 74 ms
288 kB 4.04 s
532 kB 517 ms
1.5 MB 985 ms
98.1 kB 222 ms

This will ocationally effect large file downloads, turning a 5 minute download into an hour or longer. Cancelling the download and starting it again may fix the issue.

Is this to be expected with shared (basic) droplets? Is there anything that can mitigate this? I do not recall it always being an issue, but I do not know when it started.


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alexdo
Site Moderator
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November 30, 2022

Hello there,

This is not an expected behavior.

Perhaps you can let me know how I can try to replicate the problem from my end, e.g giving me the exact version of Nginx / Apache and also file sizes and how to download them in order to conduct a legitimate test.

You can also examine the server logs for any references that may explain the situation.

Regards