That has always happened every now and then and is probably just when the number of available connections is exceeded or so.
Yes it is. And because you know about these stuffs well, I can add that we might be able to deal with the problem by applying some aggressive caching to the dynamic contents, like the front page, for example. If it's not the case where MySql is inappropriately tuned, even such an extremely short-lived cache which expires in a few seconds may do wonders here.
bogo uses Linux mainly, otherwise Firefox. He seems to be hitting the problem with large externally-hosted images.
It might be associated in some way with the 'traffic optimisation' changes rather than the software upgrade -
although I've not hit any problems with images, I've noticed some oddities - e.g. when I use (Google/ Chrome) autotranslate from a foreing language on a page that's secure, it stops being secure in English
(presumably the encryption stops working?)
I'm also on Linux 99% of the time I visit this site
(By the way, Firefox is a browser like Chrome, while Linux is an OS like Windows, to be exact.) I don't have the slightest idea what's happening with auto-translation, however. So if you see it happenning again, please let me know how I can reproduce it on my end so I could test it.
I think
@malins is right in assuming it is a mixed content problem caused by images referenced with the insecure protocol (i.e. http).
And I suspect that it could possibly have been aggravated by a recent upgrade of Chrome which started blocking insecure images (as well as scripts) from the version 81 and upward.
For those who are interested in reading the details, please read these articles:
The problem is that those particular images cannot be "upgraded" because the host (redfeline.com) does not support HTTPS. So unless either the host can move to HTTPS like we did, or the user can some how allow less secure images by using a less strict browser or changing a relevant option, there's really no remedy for that.
It's a problem which was bound to happen sooner or later as the internet has been trying to deprecate the non-secure protocol for quite sometime. All major browsers have been introducing increasingly stricter policies regarding insecure/mixed contents, and they will eventually just block them to force people to migrate to HTTPS.
So, I believe the ideal way to handle this problem is to contact the owner of Red Feline website and encourage him or her to switch to HTTPS like we did.
According to Google, over 90% of websites people open with Chrome are already on HTTPS. So, it's just a matter of time before their images won't be able to be displayed on most websites if they don't upgrade anyway.