Photon Breaks Images After moving to SSL

I checked a few of your site’s images, and they all appear to be available via Photon on my end.

Could you give Photon another try? If some of the images still appear broken, could you send me a direct link to one of the images so I can take a closer look?

Thanks!

Hey,

Photon is now activated,

Just waiting for my images to actually be served by your CDN.

Hey Jeremy,

Funny thing, every time I activate Photon, 5 min later when I check again, its de-activated?

OK, Photon is activated,

Check here:

https://themerovingian.co.za/2017/01/18/securing-macos-sleepprocess/
https://themerovingian.co.za/2017/01/15/smok-g-priv-firmware-update/

In that post the image is broken,

That’s interesting. Something appears to be blocking some of the requests made by Photon? Do you use an image hotlinking protection service? If so, could you try to deactivate it or configure it to make sure it allows requests from the Photon/1.0 User Agent?

If you do not use such a service, it could be that your hosting provider is rate-limiting the requests made by Photon on your site.
Could you ask them to take a look at your site’s logs, filter all requests made by the User Agent I mentioned above, and check that the requests are not being blocked?

Let me know how it goes!

Hey Jeremy,

So, this issue only occurs if SSL is active, if I run the site without SSL the images load,

I have the iThemes Security Plug-in, but nothing specifically related to hotlink protection,

Is there anything I can check in my .htaccess file?

I’ve deactivated all plug-ins besides JetPack, and the issue persists, if I change from HTTPS to http, the images appear, the minute I switch to https, the images break.

I’m using the “Really Simple SSL” plug-in

Thanks for the extra details!

I’ve asked one of my colleagues in charge of Photon to take a closer look, and I’ll let you know as soon as we know more.

It appears that your site got a lot slower when you switched to SSL; your site often takes more than 2 seconds to respond to a HEAD request:

time curl -I "https://themerovingian.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/img_0520-1024x1024.jpg"
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2017 13:27:52 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Wed, 01 Feb 2017 05:47:07 GMT
ETag: "13552-5477194360cc0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 79186
Cache-Control: max-age=31536000, public
Expires: Thu, 01 Feb 2018 13:27:52 GMT
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000
Pragma: public
X-Powered-By: W3 Total Cache/0.9.5.2
Content-Type: image/jpeg

real 0m2.690s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.004s

Could you contact your hosting provider and ask them to take a look? Those requests should never take more than 2 seconds; when they do Photon won’t be able to download your images.

I hope this helps.

Hey Jeremy.

So here’s the response from my hosting provider.

Hi Ebrahim

Thank you for your email.

I am not able to recreate the issue that the JetPack team is describing, the same test on multiple devices returns the following:

www513.jnb1 (Wheezy):/usr/home/themeaznyc/public_html# time curl -I https://themerovingian.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/img_0553-300x300.jpg
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2017 18:23:41 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Wed, 01 Feb 2017 05:46:40 GMT
ETag: "22d2-54771929a1000"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 8914
Cache-Control: max-age=31536000, public
Expires: Thu, 01 Feb 2018 18:23:41 GMT
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000
Pragma: public
X-Powered-By: W3 Total Cache/0.9.5.2
Content-Type: image/jpeg

real	0m0.521s
user	0m0.088s
sys	0m0.044s

As we are not able to provide technical support for Photon, I am not sure what the requirements are. However, I am not able to recreate the described lag for the SSL images.

As you can see. The tests return 0.5s responses

Also.

My site gets 100/100 on google PageSpeedInsights and 100 on tools.Pingdom.com

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/bEr6fY/https://themerovingian.co.za

I now get speedier responses (around 1.5s), but nowhere near the 0.5s you see above. That’s most likely because of your server location; I would assume that your host also ran the test from somewhere close to the server.

Could you give Photon another try now? If response times stay below 2s, you’ll be all set.

Let me know how it goes.