Weirdly long requests in Chrome, but not in Safari

Question

I have a Wordpress test installation built from the data of a preexisting site running on GoDaddy Shared Linux Hosting. Recently, I installed a new theme to test.

I started noticing weirdly long request times in Chrome and, upon inspection, it was revealed that certain files (stylesheets, mainly) were taking their sweet time being downloaded from the server on random requests to files (on the front end, the theme's style.css; the back end, load-scripts.php):

... and sometimes, these same requests would also throw errors about the Content-Length headers being off-kilter (net::ERR_CONTENT_LENGTH_MISMATCH).

It's probably also worth noting that while the instance I've screenshotted doesn't conform, most of these requests last approximately 15 seconds exactly, give or take about .02 seconds.

On the flip side, Safari handles the requesting and loading of these resources no problem.

Is this a server issue I should bring up with GoDaddy, or is it possible that Wordpress is causing it?

Answer 1

Sometimes when migrating from server to server (or OS to OS) there are strange things that happen to files, encoding, permissions, timestamps, and/or meta-data. This is especially true when extra mitigators like FTP and your PC OS are involved. Here are some suggestions that may help folks in this situation:

1. Re-uploading the offending files using a stable FTP client (such as Filezilla) set in the correct mode (ASCII) for web files, or set to auto-detect mode if you use binaries too or just don't wanna worry about switching per-file.

2. Making sure the permissions are correct for the file(s) on the server. If you (or even the OS) do not have permission to do certain actions such as saving meta-data, they may act very strange or become corrupted when automation is locked out from them. Sometimes changing them to 755 works for a test, but remember to change secure files back down to lowest permissions required.

3. Making sure the file contents are OK. Often this requires a proper editor such as notepad++. As an example, normal notepad can corrupt files such as htaccess with characters you will never see. This can happen to other files too, perhaps wonking ability for things parse, compile, or work correctly. Often you need to put the data into a new file, then delete the offending/corrupted file. Remember to save in the correct encoding if your file(s) require it.

4. If you have access, you can try turning ETAGS and other client "cache style mitigators" off. This might help fix the timestamping and allow you to deduce if its a server issue or a file issue. You can also check response headers using the network tab in chrome. This would help further deduce if there are strange triggers/rules/descriptors being sent.