High Server Response Time and Cache MISS Issue

WordPress Questions
1

I am experiencing an unusually long waiting time for server responses on my website gossipchi.it. One example is the page Vasco Rossi chi è, biografia, genitori, età, moglie e figli, canzoni, tour 2024, Festival di Sanremo, docu-film, libri, Instagram, which hasn’t been recently modified. It is showing a server response time of 1.4 seconds, which significantly impacts the user experience.

I’ve previously reached out to Kinsta support, but the replies were quite generic, so I am trying to deepen my investigation.

I have noticed from the response headers that the X-Kinsta-Cache is showing as ‘MISS’ and the Cf-Cache-Status is ‘BYPASS’, despite my efforts to set cache times to 7 days (Tools \ Site Cache). Here are the relevant header values for your reference:

I would like to understand a few key points:

  1. Why was X-Kinsta-Cache a MISS? The page hasn’t been modified recently, and it’s set to last 7 days. Surely, the page had been already visited during that time. Why is the cache status showing as ‘MISS’? Where can I find the logs to investigate this further?
  2. What is the relationship between Cloudflare’s cache and Kinsta’s cache, and how do they interact? Is Kinsta using Cloudflare as its only CDN? Are Cf-Cache-Status and Ki-Cf-Cache-Status essentially the same parameter?
  3. What do ‘Ki-Origin: g1p’ and ‘X-Edge-Location-Klb: 1’ signify?
  4. Can I use my own Cloudflare free account with Kinsta, and if so, would I lose the Edge Caching feature by doing so?
2

Hi @slim16165! Welcome to the Kinsta community!

Thank you for reaching out to us. I’m sorry to hear you feel the response you received from our Support team was generic. Our goal is always to provide the best support possible within our scope of support. I will review the conversation you had with our team to see if there is anywhere we could have done better.

I understand the importance of a fast website to ensure an optimal visitor experience. When we investigate into any request regarding extended server response times we always thoroughly investigate and ensure no server side or network issue is the cause. We also provide tools such as our Kinsta APM which can help in locating if a development related issue is causing extended transaction times. For example, if a plugin or theme function is resulting in a long running transaction that is holding up PHP and NGINX from being able to serve the page.

You may find more details about how to use our Kinsta APM tool to analyze your site’s performance in our docs at the link below:

At the moment when visiting the request URL you provided, I do see that the cache is being hit as can be seen in the screenshots below:

Screenshot 2024-01-05 at 4.52.22 PM
Screenshot 2024-01-05 at 4.52.22 PM762×920 82.4 KB

Screenshot 2024-01-05 at 4.52.34 PM
Screenshot 2024-01-05 at 4.52.34 PM762×98 4.2 KB

Are you continuing to see a issue where the cache is being missed on this page?

I also want to answer the questions to your key points:

  1. Why was X-Kinsta-Cache a MISS? The page hasn’t been modified recently, and it’s set to last 7 days. Surely, the page had been already visited during that time. Why is the cache status showing as ‘MISS’? Where can I find the logs to investigate this further?

A status of MISS would indicate the page was not currently cached. Upon visiting the site it will generate the cache, and at that point it will also be cached at the edge.

I understand however that you have configured the site to have 7 days of cache retention. This would seem to indicate that something caused the cache to be cleared, either through MyKinsta, the Kinsta MU plugin, or by using the cache clearing URL directly. I would recommend reaching out to our Support team again via live chat so we can take a deeper look into what’s causing this to occur. We will be able to review and discuss site details with you via an authenticated Support session.

You may also view details about how your site’s cache is performing via MyKinsta Analytics, or by reviewing the kinsta-cache-perf.log file within MyKinsta or SSH within the ~/logs directory. The kinsta-cache-perf.log file will provide details about what page was requested, the cache status, and how long it took for the request to be processed.

  1. What is the relationship between Cloudflare’s cache and Kinsta’s cache, and how do they interact? Is Kinsta using Cloudflare as its only CDN? Are Cf-Cache-Status and Ki-Cf-Cache-Status essentially the same parameter?

Our Kinsta cache is the cache that is generated when a page is visited and generated via PHP-FPM. The HTML that is generated is then cached on the site container and can be more quickly served by NGINX. This HTML is then also cached by our Cloudflare integration Edge caching. Cloudflare is the only CDN provider we provide directly.

The “Ki-Cf-Cache” header indicates the status of our Cloudflare integration CDN cache. The “CF-Cache-Status” header indicates the status of the customer’s personal Cloudflare CDN cache status.

  1. What do ‘Ki-Origin: g1p’ and ‘X-Edge-Location-Klb: 1’ signify?

The “Ki-Origin” header indicates the infrastructure the site was served from, in this case Google Cloud. The “X-Edge-Location-Klb” header indicates the load balancer that was used for the site, 1 means Cloudflare was used.

  1. Can I use my own Cloudflare free account with Kinsta, and if so, would I lose the Edge Caching feature by doing so?

You may certainly use your own Cloudflare free account with Kinsta. You would still be able to use Edge Caching as long as the APO feature/addon is not enabled under your own Cloudflare account. Those two types of caching do conflict with each other.

Please do let us know if you need further assistance, and always feel free to contact us via live chat within MyKinsta or via email at support@kinsta.com. Our Support team is available 24/7/365.

Best regards