I am experiencing a problem where a page appears to be taking around 8s to load for no apparent reason.
As you can see in this screenshot, all the resources on the page load well before 8s and the large majority of the loading time is reported in the "receiving" stage of the page itself.
What could cause this?
A suggestion has been made that the content-length header might be reported incorrectly due to a faulty file encoding, but having inspected the header I can't see a content-length set, could that be the cause?
An example header follows:
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:20:42 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:20:42 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
P3P: CP="NON CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa CONi OUR DELa BUS IND PHY ONL UNI PUR COM NAV DEM STA"
Set-Cookie: xid=025d2e1ac48dcb568d4dd35d79a5b726; path=/; domain=www.xxx.xx.xx; httponly
xid=025d2e1ac48dcb568d4dd35d79a5b726; path=/; domain=www.xxx.xx.xx; httponly
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Encoding: gzip
Keep-Alive: timeout=1, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
(domain deliberately censored in set-cookie)
I have checked another website which also doesn't have a content-length set and that appears to load without any issues.
I've seen this when requests are inspected by a proxy, especially if over HTTPS.