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I run a Linode with about 30 Wordpress sites. Over the past several weeks I have seen several emails from Apple users who have not been able to connect with sites on my server and I need to get this addressed.

My first thought was that this was an issue with WP 5, but one of the sites has not yet "upgraded". The next thought was possibly resources running out but the Linode is barely breaking a sweat. (Running under 10% capacity).

My current sysAdmin just wants IP addresses so he can whitelist them ... I want the issue to be addressed so if it IS the firewall, this doesn't continue to happen in the future. He just wants to get my ticket off his desk - I don't want to have to create another ticket next week.

Screenshots that have been sent my way:

iPad Safari

Any recommendations on what to do, where to start troubleshooting this? Google searches didn't show me anything that seemed terribly relevant.

Thanks for whatever you can offer!

Jeff R.
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    Did you tested the apple connected in wifi in your LAN ? As my guess is more a DNS issue if those device use a broadband LTE connection. – yagmoth555 Jan 19 '19 at 12:26
  • No I did not. These are customers trying to access my website from their homes to book appointments. How is it that they would not have an issue last week or last year and now they can no longer access the site because of a DNS issue? The sites are on the same IP address. Please advise how we could better trouble-shoot that? – Jeff R. Jan 19 '19 at 12:51
  • Your site k9corps.club has about a 4 second wait from the connection to WordPress and the initial response (time to first byte). Interestingly, your host's site (sitecrafters.biz) has about the same 4 second delay, and is hosted on the same Linode VM. Whatever is going on, this is probably affecting every site on the server. Your sysadmin probably should not be blowing this off. – Michael Hampton Jan 19 '19 at 14:29

2 Answers2

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Since k9corps.club has no AAAA Record, and both HTTP, and HTTPS on IPv4 are open, i don't think this is a firewall issue. HTTP is redirecting on HTTPS on k9corps.club:

➜  ~ time curl -I http://k9corps.club/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2019 13:44:15 GMT
Server: Apache
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
X-Pingback: http://k9corps.club/xmlrpc.php
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=10qrf7u9b6d7u9gvgag3gqrc76; path=/
Location: https://k9corps.club/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

curl -I http://k9corps.club/  0.02s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 3.691 total

4 seconds for a HEAD on a WP site (which only returns a 301) is far too long IMO. Adding a bad connection on mobile phones may induce Timeout errors in Browsers...

This does look like a performance issue for me. Have you reached any quotas?

Thomas Maier
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  • No - no quotas reached but certainly I am concerned about the 4 second load time. Where can I learn more about how to reduce that substantially? – Jeff R. Jan 19 '19 at 14:06
  • Well, first you have to track down what is causing this huge duration (Again, this is especially long because its a HTTP HEAD request on a endpoint which is only redirecting on HTTPS). Sine the 301 probably originates from Apache, check that logs first. – Thomas Maier Jan 19 '19 at 14:10
  • @JeffR. Look for heavyweight WordPress plugins that take a lot of time and resources. – Michael Hampton Jan 19 '19 at 14:16
  • Thanks Thomas and Michael - I'm "on the hunt". – Jeff R. Jan 20 '19 at 13:57
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I just had a similar issue, I wonder if this is the same problem. I had a bunch of iphones/ipads that used to connect to a wireless AP no problem, and suddenly they couldn't connect any more. No passwords were changed. one of the users said her Iphone went through a upgrade and then stopped connecting, she said it hadn't been connecting for a while now.I have an android and it was still connecting no problem. What I found to be the solution was to make a change to the AP. Encryption was set to AES and it was set to try WPA1, if that failed then it would switch to WPA2 and try again. By switching it to WPA2 only, then the iphones could connect. This did not affect my android. Not sure if you have the same situation, but that's what I ran into just two days ago. HTH.

Larryc
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