Api error

Site is slow down…

Hi there,

This warning indicates that the remote request to fetch the latest version of Font Awesome is timing out, which happens on lower quality servers typically. At present, yo should be fine because the latest version will still be loaded as a fallback (as the warning indicates).

Alternately, you can try modifying the timeout using the bfa_wp_remote_get_args filter that is provided in the plugin. The default value is 10 seconds. You can decrease this to speed up your site, and just serve the backup always. Or you can increase it in the hopes of connecting with the remote server, however this will possibly slow down your site even more.

Ideally, you should just switch to higher quality hosting, which is most likely the root issue at play here.

Let me know if you have any further questions!

– Mickey

Hi Mickey,

I had the same issue like Maximkadum. At first I thought it was caused by my hosting, then CloudFlare, until I figured out Better Font Awesome was the source of problem. It actually made my site considered down and I got like 12 emails throughout the day from Jetpack notifying about it. All has been running well again after I disabled your plugin. Here is my site btw: https://www.sunarlim.com

Blaming the hosting is not really fair and may not eliminate it completely. My blog runs from a VPS with two dedicated IPs which I have used for over 3 years without any issue. I am pretty confident mine can be considered a good hosting.

Would you consider to create an option in the settings to only use the backup? Or maybe provide instructions in how to hack the plugin code to skip on checking to jsdelivr server. I really do not to edit all my posts that are already using shortcodes from your great plugin.

Thanks.

– Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for reporting this issue, and for informing me that this isn’t necessarily a server issue – which is what I’d previously encountered as the cause of this problem. I can definitely work on a way to force the backup to be served. It will take a bit of time, but in the meantime can you send me any error message you received, ideally both the Jetpack messages and any admin notices that BFA generated when you experience this problem?

Thanks!
– Mickey

Hi Mickey,

Thanks for responding to my reply. I have tried to look for another plugin to temporarily replace BFA until this issue can be resolved permanently and I have to say, I failed. BFA is really the best plugin to add Font Awesome for my posts.

The messages from Jetpack were really just downtime/uptime notifications like this:

Jetpack Monitor is on the job, keeping tabs on https://www.sunarlim.com. During our last check on Saturday, October 18, 12:02 pm, we noticed that your site was down.

Error message from BFA when accessing the admin was the same like Maximkadum’s:

The attempt to reach the jsDelivr API server failed with the following error: http_request_failed: connect() timed out! (URL: https://api.jsdelivr.com/v1/jsdelivr/libraries/fontawesome/?fields=versions,lastversion)

I assume for whatever reason jsDelivr blocked my server. Since I am using a dedicated IP, I can assure that it is not like some other site(s) abusing their API. Since I am not alone, I wonder if there are also other BFA users experience the same problem but cannot pinpoint the source of the issue. Maybe jsDelivr API is not designed to be called every time a page loads on the front page?

An update to fix this would be greatly appreciated. Also if you can direct me to manually change the functions file to skip calling to jsDelivr and load the backup instead, it should be enough to wait until the update can be released.

Thanks.

-Michael

Hi again Michael,

Apologies for this inconvenience, but I think I’ve got a solution that should help. I just released version 1.0.5, which includes a bfa_force_fallback filter – this should allow you to just use the fallback and avoid any requests to jsDelivr.

Here’s an example of how you can do this:

add_filter( 'bfa_force_fallback', 'my_force_fallback' );
function my_force_fallback( $force_fallback ) {
	return true;
}

Please let me know if you need any further help, and thanks for your patience!

Hi Mickey,

You’re awesome! Thanks so much for listening and offering a solution for this.

I just re-activated BFA after a week and it seems the connection problem jsDelivr is no longer there. I guess the IP blocking or other issue that caused my server unable to connect has been lifted/resolved. But it is good to know if it is happening again, I can just apply the bfa_force_fallback filter to fix it.

Please keep up the great work. After installing 2-3 different Font Awesome plugins last week, I think BFA is really the best one for WP.

Cheers-