We use cloudflare to cache (small) audio files. Most of the time this works fine, but in the past week or so we’ve started having an odd situation whereby the file will simply not load. Usually (in Firefox) each audio file will see three requests. When the file fails to load, the third request (which fetches the whole file) will stall, with no warning or errors being thrown. After 100 minutes, it eventually throws an error, ns_error_et_partial_transfer. The only way of getting around the issue is to purge the Cloudflare cache, and even then it’s a bit hit and miss. It’s impossbile to track, and difficult to reliably reproduce, yet happens regularly enough (out of 8 files, we had it happen on two of them) that it makes things unusable as they are.
What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?
We’ve spent the entire day trying to figure out what exactly is causing the issue, without success, as it takes so long for an error to be thrown, and there’s no feedback to explain what’s going on.
A few weeks ago this was all working fine, but today you’re lucky to be able to play more than a few files without it happening. Nothing has changed on our server that could cause this, and by trying to load the file directly we’re eliminating the effect of any javascript. Loading the file directly in dev mode works fine every time.
What are the steps to reproduce the issue?
Try to load a cached audio file directly in the browser. Purge the Cloudflare cache. Eventually it’ll just get stuck not loading.
The only pattern we have noticed is that sometimes when you purge the cache, whether single file or purge all, the page will sometimes load a file that’s 15-20 minutes old - and when it does that, it doesn’t load at all. This isn’t the only thing that causes it not to load, but it is one of them. This whole thing is bizarre.
I don’t seem to be able to edit my posts, so I’m posting any additional info as and when I come across it. Another very weird issue is that when you’ve cleared the cache, you don’t always get the new file. If you Ctrl+F5, you sometimes get a new file (which works), but sometimes end up being served a 15-20 minute old file, which doesn’t work at all and never loads. I just Ctrl+F5 refreshed four times. Three times I got the 15-20 minute old file, once I got the new one which worked. Why should that happen with any file if the cache has been purged?
Just to update, this is still an intermittent issue with the symptoms as described above and appears to be an issue on the Cloudflare side of things. With this forum being the only line of support there’s not much else I can do to try and bring it to their attention.
However, I am a little bit confused. If Cloudflare shouldn’t be used to cache audio files, why would the default caching rules include .ogg, .mp3, .mp4 etc? It would seem odd for them to be trying to cache .ogg files if they don’t then support serving them?
Is there any official guidance from Cloudflare saying it should not be used for these files? I did have a look before I posted this, but all that came up were posts from years ago that referred to documents that were no longer around.
We had a look into Cloudflare Stream a while back, but it was specifically for streaming videos, and was rather buggy when we looked into it.
We could use R2, but as this is an issue that’s only really popped up in the last week or two, it would seem to be more to do with a configuration change on Cloudflare’s end, and I wanted to check before we did anything drastic.
