Rackspace Cloud Site and ACF & FCF – connection timed out error

• robbiegod

• March 3, 2015 at 1:40 am

I’m working on a website that of course uses ACF and flexible content fields. I’m running into a problem where I’ve made a group of custom fields using FCF and populated a page with a variety of different content. I suppose i have somewhere in the realm of 10 FCF group that make up 10 groups of content/sections on the page loading in content from different parts of the website. When i go edit this page in wp-admin, I often see a connection timed out error message.

I’m using the Telerik Fiddler Web Debugger and can see in the Log this message:

Warning: ClientHello record was 508 bytes long. Some servers have problems with ClientHello’s greater than 255 bytes. https://github.com/ssllabs/research/wiki/Long-Handshake-Intolerance

I talked with Rackspace Support. I am using a Rackspace Cloud Site to host my website. This means there is a 30 sec limit for saving the page. A limitation that i cannot adjust via .htaccess because it is part of there load balancer setup.

I did try increasing PHP memory to 128 MB via htaccess. This didn’t seem to help either.

I also tried clearing my cookies and complete browser history.

Have others run into this problem?

Is there a way to compress the values being loading into the page so i don’t get the connection timed out message anymore?

Update #1

Oddly enough, I seem to get more time-out when sections are collapsed then when they are all expanded. When they are collapsed does the plugin send in more data through the line?

Update #2 and New Question
I haven’t come up with a solution yet for connection time out errors i see. So, I am hoping this question will nail it. Is there a way to optimize what is sent through the browser when you update a post using Flexible Custom Fields? The pages I am making have alot of content on them now. On one page i have about 14 FCF sections that hold repeaters, text, images. These pages are going to be pretty heavy. I am hoping that there is a plugin that will maybe compress was is sent through the browser when updating pages in the wp-admin. Any thoughts?

• clay

• March 18, 2015 at 12:58 am

I am having the same issue with a field group of 27 fields. That doesn’t seem like a lot to me. The changes actually go through, but I get a timeout everytime I save or update my fields. It also timed out when I duplicated that field group.

• clay

• March 18, 2015 at 1:01 am

For those that don’t use Rackspace Cloud sites…here is more detail on the timeouts and why they happen:

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/connection-timed-out-error-message-1

“The bottom line is that data must be sent back to the client’s browser to keep the connection alive. So regardless of what sort of processing a page is doing, it must return data frequently or the load balancer will assume the connection has been dropped and will forcefully terminate it. Put simply, there will be some limitations of the shared architecture of Cloud Sites that will not allow us to resolve all issues for all customers.”

• clay

• March 18, 2015 at 1:15 am

Ok…So now everything is working fine. I did nothing. I find that like most hosts, performance can differ from hour to hour. The admin is now super speedy and saving field groups is taking about 3 seconds vs over 30 before.

Sorry…nothing to see here. Move along.

• robbiegod

• March 18, 2015 at 2:43 am

hi clay, thanks for your feedback. The way i fixed my issue was i optimized my code and re-organized my data. I moved all of my Flexible Custom Fields into individual posts in a custom post type and setup a new “relation” field to move those modules into the page. Sped things up.