The Admin UI takes 1.6 minutes to load, but REST is so fast

[nauvalazhar]

Bug report

Describe the bug

First of all, thank you for making Strapi which makes my job easier.

I have a problem with the Strapi admin UI. It took 1.6 minutes to load, even though it's not the first time it loads. However, REST and GraphQL are fine.

I didn't install any plugins other than the internal ones. I've also done a production build. I've read some similar issues here, but there's no clear solution.

Is something missing? thanks.

Expected behavior

The page loads in just a few seconds.

Screenshots

System

• Node.js version: v10.16.0
• NPM version:6.9.0
• Strapi version: 3.1.2
• Database: MySQL
• Operating system: Ubuntu 16.04

[derrickmehaffy]

Are you on Heroku?

[nauvalazhar]

No, I'm using DigitalOcean with 2GB RAM.

[derrickmehaffy]

That's quite odd 🤔 I just spun up one of our one-click's and couldn't really see a difference. Do you have a slower internet connection or are a long distance from the region you selected on DO?

[nauvalazhar]

My internet connection is fine. I also have a few Node apps, but not this slow. BTW, I am using Nginx and reverse proxy. I also had several other Strapi installations on the same server, and they were all slow too.

[derrickmehaffy]

I haven't been able to replicate, we will need more information to see if this a Strapi bug or an environment issue.

[M-erb]

My team is seeing this as well ever since we updated to from strapi v3.1.4(loading the adminui was completely fine here) to now on v3.2.3(takes about 30s to load which is an eternity to our content managers)

Node.js version: v12.18.4
NPM version: 6.14.6
Strapi version: 3.2.3
Database: MySQL
Operating system: Ubuntu 18.04.5
Reverse Proxy: Nginx 1.14

We are running on our own servers through a local data center. It seems to be hanging on a main.#####.chunk.js file that is transferred at 1.09MB (un-gzipped 6.66MB)

Came here looking for a solution.

*edited: added last statement and added un gzipped size

[M-erb]

Found a solution for me! #7439 @albatrocity suggested disabling Brotli compression which was recently added to Strapi.

In /config/middleware.js

FROM:

gzip: {
  enabled: true
}

TO:

gzip: {
  enabled: true,
  options: {
    br: false
  }
}

Can read more about it from the linked issue and in the middleware config docs here: https://strapi.io/documentation/v3.x/concepts/middlewares.html#core-middleware-configurations

Once this config was pushed to our servers the loading issue went away. Hope this helps someone out there!

[albatrocity]

@nauvalazhar this sounds like what I was running into, and what @M-erb posted was the solution for me. A note about this was added to the Heroku guide since that's where I was experiencing it, so it's good to know it's an issue on DO as well. I'll make a PR that updates the Digital Ocean guide if you can confirm that disabling Brotli resolves your issue.

If it's also happening on your own managed servers, I think it's worth discussing if koa-compress@5 is an appropriate default for the community.

[derrickmehaffy]

Indeed it appears Brotli compression appears to be causing some issues.

@alexandrebodin should we disable this by default?