title: Quicktimes taking minutes to begin playing in browser via Centos/lighttpd server, Mavericks/Chrome client
body: <p>Recently migrated a Centos server from Apache to lighttpd 1.4.35. Also migrated client OSX machines from Snow Leopard to Mavericks (with latest Chrome, Quicktime.)</p>
  
  <p>Certain Quicktime movies of size > 40 MB that used to play instantly now consistently take minutes to begin playing (blue Quicktime "Q" appears, so for these plugin is loading but taking many minutes to work.)</p>
  
  <p>The quicktime is embedded (via typical HTML embed tag) in a CGI page served with fastcgi. </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Observed lag on a sandbox server with no other traffic.</p></li>
  <li><p>Observed that downloading problem Quicktimes (rather than playing them) in browser is near-instantaneous.</p></li>
  <li><p>strace reveals that lighttpd spends 70-90% of the lag time waiting (epoll_wait).</p></li>
  <li><p>installed mod_h264_streaming v 2.2.7 on lighttpd. No effect. </p></li>
  <li><p>tweaked lighttpd.conf IO preferences, including:</p>
  
  <p>server.network-backend   = "linux-aio-sendfile"</p>
  
  <p>server.event-handler     = "linux-sysepoll"</p>
  
  <p>(which I understand is redundant in lighttpd 1.4.35 but hey, I tried.) No effect.</p></li>
  <li><p>determined it would be really strange for a massive lag on such modest Quicktimes to be lighttpd's fault</p></li>
  <li><p>observed same lag in Safari, as well as on client VMWare IE &amp; Chrome</p></li>
  <li><p>When accessing a problem Quicktime by url (file:///...) in Safari, it plays instantly. Doing the same in Chrome gets the blue Q and <em>never</em> plays, even after an hour of waiting.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>If the issue is some combination of codec/hinted streaming/other distinguishing feature of the problem Quicktimes, then 1) bizarre that the lag is so great and yet eventually resolves and 2) I have no control over that.</p>
  
  <p>I'm hoping there is some Quicktime plugin update I'm missing, but I see no evidence of such a thing.</p>
  
  <p>I am deeply confused. Any assistance will be appreciated.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Update Aug 18: Confirmed that Apache serves the problem Quicktimes near-instantly. The problem is indeed something about my lighttpd configuration.</li>
  </ul>