Slow download speed form WordPress.org servers

  • Resolved kenny

    (@fickwp)


    2 weeks, 5 days ago

    Hi, i’m running around a hundred web sites across 5 different self-hosted servers through a reverse proxy. All servers have are running on the latest version of debian with the latest version of apache2 and php8.3

    Since a few weeks i have the issue that when i update a WordPress site, often one or multiple plugin downloads are just so slow that php curl times out. It’s not any specific plugin, it’s random and also happens to plugins that are just a few Mb in size.

    The servers and websites themselves are fast and have no download/upload issues but downloading anything from WordPress.org servers will often (but not always) cap my speed at around 100-200 kbits or less even though i have 1gbits download.
    Downloading any file from any other server works with full speed, no issues. (i tested this on the linux terminal but also with a php function from inside one of my wordpress sites)

    When i go to my server terminal and run a wget wordpress.org/latest.zip or curl -o test.zip https://wordpress.org/latest.zip it will very often have these slow download speeds.
    I checked my servers , none of them have high bandwith or resource usage and this problem just started weeks ago though it ran just fine for over a year prior.

    It would seem like WordPress.org servers are capping my download speed but i can’t find anything online about them doing anything like that to specific IPs so i don’t know exactly what to do now.

    I’m grateful for any ideas. Thank you!

    • This topic was modified 2 weeks, 5 days ago by kenny.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Dion Hulse

    (@dd32)

    Meta Developer

    2 weeks, 2 days ago

    Hi @fickwp,

    There hasn’t been any widespread reports of such issues.

    It’s hard for us to know if there’s anything causing this, as there’s a lot of variables in play outside of our control.
    For example, your upstream provider may be limiting bandwidth to WordPress.org, or a network link they use that connects to a network link we use might be at capacity.

    Some things that might help:

    • Can you check if the speed via https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/latest.zip is the same poor performance?
    • Can you provide the output of mtr -T -P 443 wordpress.org to see if there’s any packet loss happening on an intermediate network?
    • Can you provide a test IP of your servers, so we can perform the above in reverse?

    There’s a also chance that your servers are hosted on a network which has been the source of recent traffic that has tripped up DDOS protections in our upstream providers network.

    Gulshan Kumar

    (@thegulshankumar)

    2 weeks, 2 days ago

    I can confirm that the issue is occurring. The download speed is notably slow, causing plugin updates to take an excessive amount of time to complete. I recommend that the WordPress team consider utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve performance.

    Thread Starter kenny

    (@fickwp)

    1 week, 5 days ago

    Can you check if the speed via https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/latest.zip is the same poor performance?

    Thanks for the reply. Yes.

    Can you provide the output of mtr -T -P 443 wordpress.org to see if there’s any packet loss happening on an intermediate network?

    this should be fine i guess

    Can you provide a test IP of your servers, so we can perform the above in reverse?

    Here you go:
    212 * 183 * 61 * 41
    (replaced dots with asterisks so bots wont crawl the ip)

    Thread Starter kenny

    (@fickwp)

    1 week, 4 days ago

    Our network administration was looking at this for a while and they figured it was the firewall choking. I still don’t understand why this would only trigger for wordpress servers but i’m glad it works again.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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