Got Burned By Cloudflare?

Bertel Schmitt
by Bertel Schmitt

Did you notice? TTAC loads much faster. Most likely , you did not notice. An old axiom in the nerd industry is that performance gains mostly go unnoticed. Slowdowns on the other hand drive people nuts. Our gee-whiz kids in Toronto moved TTAC to something called “Cloudflare,” which really speeds up load times. The trouble is: Once in a while, the Cloudflare suffers burnout and TTAC becomes inaccessible.

Today was such a day. Because TTAC lives (computer-wise) “in the cloud,” you may have experienced outages, or not, depending on where you are. The trouble is, when it happens, it doesn’t seem to clear up. It actually does, but you won’t notice it. Something in the cache of your browser brings up the dreaded screen above, again and again, while others can enjoy TTAC.

So here is what you do: When you see the Cloudflare splash screen, wait a while. Then clear the cache of your browser (in Internet Explorer and Firefox, it is Ctrl-Shift-DEL), and if you are lucky, TTAC is back. If you aren’t lucky, take a break, then try again. Just don’t do what I did today: Pull the rest of your hair out.

Bertel Schmitt
Bertel Schmitt

Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.

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  • Brandloyalty Brandloyalty on Jul 10, 2011

    It's better for me. Before, when changing pages and scrolling, it would jump around while various elements of the new page loaded. Just as I'd get annoyed enough to click on the Stop button, the new page would finish loading. Seems to work fine now. Thanks

  • Eldard Eldard on Jul 11, 2011

    Got it yesterday. Thought I got banned since it wasn't loading on Opera but does on Chrome where I wasn't logged in. lol

  • Psarhjinian Psarhjinian on Jul 11, 2011

    I got this a few times. It's irritating, but no more irritating than having posts quarantined for using the kind of language that, well, you hear six-year-olds use at recess. Come on, if you're going to give Jack Baruth column space, you can assume that your audience can handle seeing words like "sh_tty".

  • Admin Admin on Jul 14, 2011

    For what it's worth I'd like to better explain the causes behind this and why you're seeing that message, and why you sometimes have to clear your cache. That message happens when cloudflare gets an improper response from the origin server (the server that actually hosts TTAC), this is typically because there is a problem in the web stack. More often than not its caused by an invalid cache on our end (typically APC [runtime php opcode cache]). This causes the origin to return blank pages, cloudflare notices this and does not cache the blank page- instead choosing to serve you an older copy of the page from its cache and warning you about it. This is an option and benefit to cloudflare as your site is never 100% down. Now, some browsers will cache this page for an extended period if the content has not changed in a few hours and may not re-request the page on the next reload, in which case clearing your browser or issuing a forceful reload should fix the problem. In short, the problem is most often on the origin end we are aware of it and are working for a solution. The good news is that TTAC is -WAY- faster than it used to be, and with a faster service we can start adding more rich features. If anyone feels that they have been incorrectly banned by cloudflare and find the site inaccessible please contact support@thetruthaboutcars.com and we can whitelist your IP address. I've already done this for a handful of people using weird devices or coming in from questionable countries/ip blocks. One of the few, the proud, Toronto Tech Guys. Note that I may not be around to read replies, if you have an urgent issue please contact support. Thank you.

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