massive performance drop when redirected to https protocol

[vxda]

Hi guys, i noticed that my page is responding significantly slower when accessed by https protocol, anyone experienced similar issues?

[arjen]

How do you redirect? Do you have an url? I've never experienced any significant slowdowns. I try to redirect as early as possible in .htaccess.

[vxda]

thing is that you can access page using both protocols, no redirect implemented yet, but you can see difference 
http:// vs https://

[teppo]

Some extra overhead is to be expected, but it really shouldn't affect performance "massively". Hard to say more without seeing actual numbers and/or digging into the implementation, but first you should make absolutely sure that there's nothing strange going on:

• Check that there aren't any 404 requests due to HTTP/HTTPS mismatch. These can sometimes result in very noticeable increase in load times.
• Double check for odd redirects using something like Chrome dev tools: make sure that your HTTPS requests are not, for some weird reason, getting unnecessarily redirected.
• Make sure that your server isn't doing anything it shouldn't be doing when request is sent over HTTPS. This is a bit vague, but without knowing anything about your server, it's hard to narrow this point down either ?
• Finally, try to see if there are any third party dependencies (browser or server side) that could cause the delay.

Regarding server side issues, you can find useful tips from the typical sources, such as Stack Overflow. This particular thread, for an example, mentions keepalive as a possible source of slowdowns. Although I find it hard to believe that someone would intentionally disable keepalive, that's definitely worth checking if the issue is very noticeable.

Probably plenty of other stuff to check too, but to summarise: HTTPS is slower than HTTP, but the difference is rarely in "massive" scale ?

Edit: if it wasn't already clear, I'd like to add that there's a very high probability that this issue is actually not about ProcessWire per se, but something else entirely.

Edited November 21, 2018 by teppo

[dotnetic]

Another hint: Use a browser without installed extensions. For example Chrome in Incognito mode. Maybe an extension causes the slowdown.