HELP(?): Neocities stylesheet lag?

[pixelsafari]

I've been getting this really weird problem where whatever changes I've made to my CSS stylesheet don't actually apply to my website for a while. It's super inconsistent: some days it updates immediately, and other times it takes forever... which is super frustrating! 

It's not a caching issue because I force refresh my page every time. Every other file works like normal, and if I import the same CSS into my HTML file it works fine?? It's only started happening more recently, when my website's gotten a bit bigger. My website is 29.28 MB big (2.9% of my 1GB), and I have thousands of files- but they're almost entirely small images. I'm sure there's people with way beefier websites out there.

Is anyone else getting this problem or is it just time for me to get an actual code editor?   

[wygolvillage]

I get that issue sometimes! It's pretty weird. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't 

[Mela]

I've noticed this too for my website. Sometimes when I restart the entire browser it works but other times I have to wait. Either way it's really annoying... Also a few days ago, after a long time I hadn't updated my website, it didn't load at all! Luckily a few hours later it seemed to work again.

[shevek]

Yes, I experience the same recently. It also takes ages to replace images for me. I had to actually delete my background image completely and then upload the new version because only that forced it to update. A simple replacement didn't work as it usually did.

[pixelsafari]

Glad I'm not the only one.

It also takes ages to replace images for me. I had to actually delete my background image completely and then upload the new version because only that forced it to update. A simple replacement didn't work as it usually did.

I've been getting that too! It's gotten to the point where I don't even bother replacing images anymore. I just delete the original and/or upload the new one under a different name. Which is annoying when all your images are sorted very carefully via their names

[brisray]

It all might have to do with the way with the internet works. Neocities own servers are probably caching pages, the data centers where the pages are served from certainly are and then there's your own browser cache.

Caching simply means the content is stored somewhere closer to the end users (us) rather than the origin servers (Neocities). It all usually works very well with something called the TTL (Time To Live) in the cache before it is refreshed. Sometimes it just depends on when you updated the page as to how long you have to wait until you see the changes.

Just from CloudFlare, their free tier TTL is 2 hours, but their business-class TTL is 1 second. If you assume that Neocities' TTL is 5 minutes, if you update a page at the start of a time period, you could be waiting 3 or 4 minutes for the page update to be seeen, or you could get lucky and only be waiting a couple of seconds.

Bonus:

The Neocities sites I look at are usually served from a data center Chicago. There's a list of them and which one you are using at https://status.neocities.org/. The x-cached line shows whether it was a miss (had to come from the server) or a hit (already held in a cache somewhere).

[tarraxahum]

There's a list of them and which one you are using at https://status.neocities.org/.

And that's how I learned that my website is served in Germany! :D

But yeah, I've noticed all of that too, although it usually helps to wait a few (five sounds legit yeah) minutes before force-reloading the page and then boom the changes catch up.

Honestly I just figured with how many people join Neocities these days - it's probably natural some stuff is getting slower.

[pixelsafari]

It all might have to do with the way with the internet works. Neocities own servers are probably caching pages, the data centers where the pages are served from certainly are and then there's your own browser cache.

That makes a lot of sense.  It's pretty easy to forget that my website isn't some social media profile, but a whole (mostly) independent place on the internet! I don't think my short attention span helps either

That page you linked is super interesting. Mine is served in Sydney!