[Solved] Slow image loading in 4.4.0

[Hexsplosions]

After upgrading the IPS 4.4.0 and making changes based on its new features, I was inundated with complaints of slow loading images and grey placeholders persisting for anything up to 10 seconds.

 

It turns out that there's nothing wrong with IPS 4.4.0 or my hosting, but that by changing this to only serve insecure images via my server meant my members got to experience true load times of their image hosting services, such as Flickr, Dropbox, etc.

Changing this back to 'All Images' solves the issue completely.

I thought I'd share this experience in case anybody else suddenly gets reports of slow-loading images in threads, so you don't waste time diagnosing issues with IPS, Lazy Loading or your own hosting.

[USCJ Digital]

On my cloud account, the 'disabled' option was selected by default.

Does this even matter for cloud accounts?

[Hexsplosions]

4 hours ago, USCJ Digital said:

On my cloud account, the 'disabled' option was selected by default.

Does this even matter for cloud accounts?

It is disabled by default.

The setting was originally not as granular as this, you either served images from your local server or you didn't. The reason it was useful was when your site used HTTPS whilst other sites did not, which could result in security alerts to end users. Serving images from your local server solved this problem. In 4.4.0 you have more control over this and can elect to only serve insecure images from your local server, which makes sense as you can save your own resources by not serving images that are already secure. The problem that I encountered was that there was a stark difference in speed between images served from my local server and images served from third party sites.

I've reverted to serving all images from my local server to preserve speed.

[Yamamura]

I wonder why the "Insecure Images" option is recommended? 🤔 I also use the "All Images" option, because in this case thumbnails are created for all images. By setting the desired size and compression quality for thumbnails in ACP, you can speed up page loading.

[bfarber]

Generally speaking, fetching, caching and serving a remote image through a PHP proxy script is not going to be as fast as just letting the web server serve the image directly. Usually the remote images will load faster on their own than be served through the image proxy, however if the image is not served securely it will break the security of your page as a whole. Subsequently, if you are using https then we recommend serving insecure images through the image proxy.