Issue with Shield Security and site response times

@Paul and anyone else using Shield… I have just had a fun few hours trying to troubleshoot a problem affecting many of my sites. I was getting a marked slow down in response time… GTmetrix showed it as a 2 second wait before anything was returned from the server. I had the hosting company investigating, and it seemed to be kicking in on various sites at different times, starting last night.

I finally had the idea to deactivate Shield and that fixed it - load time went from 2.6s down to 0.6 seconds where it should be. So it is something in the latest version (8.5.0) - Shield was auto-updating so it was hitting my sites at different times.

You might want to look into this Paul. Let me know if you need any more details from me.

This is how it looked on the waterfall chart. Sites were typically “waiting” for about 2 seconds.

Sorry to hear about this… Would you be open to providing access to one of the affected sites so we can isolate the issue? If so could drop us a quick email via this form so I have a contact for you and we can take it from there?

Thanks!

Err, no that doesn’t work. I have to search the library and then it says I need a licence key.

Edit. Sent you a PM @Paul

Thanks for your help @ozfiddler! Found the problem, and just released a fix, 8.5.1
Really appreciate the early notice on this, and the coooperation to help find the bug, as we couldn’t replicate it here reliably.
Cheers!

That’s great news. Glad I could help. Certainly looks back to normal…