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Accepted
George Tasioulis
Asked: 2012-09-24 17:41:57 +0800 CST

More than 3 seconds "Initial Connection" time (webpagetest.org)

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I'm having a weird issue with a vBulletin forum, on a 2х Xeon E5645 w/ 16GB RAM CentOS 6.3 x86_64 web server with cPanel and LiteSpeed; It takes too long to start loading...

When I tested it with webpagetest.org I saw that for every request there's a 3 second "Initial connection" delay, which I don't know why is happening. Here's a screenshot: enter image description here

CPU Load is between 0.03 and 0.05, I've got several GB of free RAM, practical no I/O activity, and this delay can occur even with only one visitor on the forum.

Where do you suggest I start searching? What could be the reason for this kind of delay? I don't think it's the webserver, or the forum because there's another website on the server (total 2 sites) which is WordPress based, and has exactly the same issue with the 3 second initial connection delay. I believe it's OS related, but need a clue on where to start looking.

linux

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Check reverse DNS -- the logging on the web server may be trying to lookup the name of the client, and timing out.

    Test it by putting a known IP address in the /etc/hosts table, make sure you can ping by name (lookup working -- if not check the /etc/resolv.conf).

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  2. This makes me think about MTU issues. Ping will work fine because it sends shorts packets, but what happens when you ping with larger packets ? And you did disable jumbo frames, did you ?

    ping -s 1500 your_server

    Either that, or a firewall in the middle does not like your initial TCP parameters or MTU, and/or block 'fragmentation needed' ICMP errors.

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  3. Try using: OpenDNS - Cloud Internet Security and DNS.

    $ cat /etc/resolv.conf 
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
$
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