HTTP connections are fast from local network, very slow from the outside world

Question

I setup a Wordpress server in a Raspberry Pi with nginx, MariaDB and ufw. I also setup the No-IP service. When I access the server from my local network (192.168.0.173) I get a fast response but when I try to access from the outside world the response is very slow (aarroyoc.noip.me). It loads, as I can see the title bar in the browser but it just keeps loading and loading.

I think Wordpress isn't the problem because when I access from local network the speed is fine. My router bandwith can't be a problem, I usually run game servers and I didn't experienced such problems.

I downloaded the frontpage using cURL and the response was fast, so the problem might be in the browser but I don't know what is making the web so slow.

Why do I get a fast response from local network browsers and cURL outside Internet but it's so slow on outside Internet browsers?

EDIT

Doing more tests I've found that PHPInfo is fast (http://aarroyoc.noip.me/phpinfo.php) from outside network but the Wordpress panel is slow (http://aarroyoc.noip.me/wp-admin/) only from the outside.

Have a look at this test - looks like the server is responding quite quickly and external resources are slowing it down. Not sure why it'd be fast inside the network and slow outside http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160613_3C_e7172af91c81953d60b2392fb6db275f/ — Tim, Jun 13 '16 at 20:34

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 13 '16 at 22:40

That's because you set up your Wordpress server to redirect to your internal IP, 192.168.0.173. So when external clients try to reach your Wordpress server, they are being redirected to http://192.168.0.173/wp-login.php which will, of course, fail after a timeout. The same goes for your Wordpress homepage, there are a number of resources, like CSS and image files, that are being served from http://192.168.0.173 instead of http://aarroyoc.noip.me.

The reason why PHPInfo works, is because it's completely self-contained. Even the PHP logo is embedded into the HTML. Check the source to see what I mean.

No, the site is slow, because the browser is trying to download items from the site that reside on an IP address it can't contact. — Rouben, Jun 13 '16 at 23:20

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 05 '20 at 18:46

I don't know if this will help some people, because i got the same problem when i was setting up my wordpress and couldn't get around the problem. This was very annoying to me but i remember that i sucessfully configured without any problems once.

Whoever with researching and trying stuff to see what went wrong i've tried to configure the wp-config.php to use the database created with mysql/mariadb.

sudo mv /var/www/html/wp-config-sample.php /var/www/html/wp-config.php
sudo nano /var/www/html/wp-config.php

 define( 'DB_NAME', 'wordpress' );

/** MySQL database username */ define( 'DB_USER', 'yourusername' );

/** MySQL database password */ define( 'DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpassword!' );

/** MySQL hostname */ define( 'DB_HOST', 'localhost' );

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */ define( 'DB_CHARSET', 'utf8' );

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */ define( 'DB_COLLATE', '' );

and accessed https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

Got my secrets key, deleted the lines and pasted the new ones.

And that got it working for me. Hope this helps someone.

HTTP connections are fast from local network, very slow from the outside world

2 Answers2