Badge Images Often Fail To Load In Github README

[Undistraction]

I've noticed that at least 50% of the time one or more badges on the README's from my various github project fail to display the image. I'm on a very fast connection (~ 100MBS)

In the error console:

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 504 (Gateway Timeout)

The URLS are not the URLs added to the badges in the README, but point to some kind of Github cache:

URL from badge: https://img.shields.io/npm/v/blain.svg
URL of error: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fa71495d8e006d53927660ed22594c3e7097c5a6/68747470733a2f2f696d672e736869656c64732e696f2f6e706d2f762f626c61696e2e737667

• Multiple refreshes usually get one or all of the badges to load correctly.
• Tested in Chrome, Safari and Firefox
• I have seen this a lot recently on other project's READMEs

Example Repos

• https://github.com/Undistraction/blain/blob/master/README.md

• https://github.com/char0n/ramda-adjunct/blob/master/README.md

• https://github.com/facebook/react

• Possibly related: 'Waiting for img.shields.io"  #445

[paulmelnikow]

Hi, thanks for raising this issue. I've observed this behavior too; I'm sure many people can corroborate.

If you look at https://status.shields-server.com/ and click on one server at a time, you'll see that response times sometimes spike. It's not about the speed of your connection; rather some combination of our server's capacity, and the upstream services being slow or rate limiting us. Github images are served through a proxy, and the meaning of the 504 Gateway Timeout is that the shields server has taken too long to respond to the proxy, and the proxy has given up.

I would love to put work into making Shields more reliable. I think the fix is to add server capacity, and given that we're not going to make upstream rate limiting go away, be much more aggressive with caching through several means:

• Excess server capacity and or elastic scaling so we can handle traffic spikes (currently there are three virtual machines, period)
• Caching pieces of data from API responses (not just computed badge text, as we do now)
• Basing cache priority on frequency (not just recency)
• Sharing cache data between servers (not cache per server as now)
• Bigger caches (requires more memory than our virtual machines have)

Our server budget is extremely limited, and frankly we need a significantly larger budget to consider any of these these options.

We ask developers who know and love shields to please make a one-time $10 donation. If you've already given, please ask your developer friends to do the same, or solicit big donations from big projects / companies who use Shields.

https://opencollective.com/shields

Also open to promotion ideas, ideas that don't take money, and in general discussing further!

[pixelass]

In my case it's more like

• 90% of all cases at least one badge is not loaded.
• 50% of all cases at least 2 bdges are not loded

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 504 (Gateway Timeout)
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 504 (Gateway Timeout)
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 504 (Gateway Timeout)
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 504 (Gateway Timeout)
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 504 (Gateway Timeout)

[g105b]

Is this simply a case of not having enough server capacity? If so, would you mind letting us know the specifics of what server is being used, where it is located, and any details regarding bandwidth?

[RedSparr0w]

Just a quick test of the github timeouts:

1 second delay:

2 second delay:

3 second delay:

3.9 second delay:

3.95 second delay:

4 second delay:

Edit:
Removed 5, 6 second delays as not needed,
4 seconds seems to always timeout,
3.95 seconds looks to be okay.

[paulmelnikow]

Is this simply a case of not having enough server capacity? If so, would you mind letting us know the specifics of what server is being used, where it is located, and any details regarding bandwidth?

@g105b Server capacity, yes, combined with more aggressive caching. See my comment above: #1568 (comment)

There are three servers, single-core VPS's with 2 GB RAM: VPS SSD 1 from OVH. One is in Gravelines, France, and I believe the other two are in Quebec, Canada.

@RedSparr0w Thanks for those tests!

To everyone following this issue, if you know and love Shields, please make a one-time $10 donation if you haven't already, and ask your friends to do the same! https://opencollective.com/shields