This website suddenly got really slow today¹. Among some other things, I installed New Relic² to monitor performance changes. I'm thinking about removing application monitoring to keep true to the statement in the footer³ and only keep server monitoring alive. Application monitoring adds a bunch of JavaScript and pings every few seconds and I feel that I don't need all that for this website. If I were running something mission-critical, New Relic would be my first choice. There's a free one-user tier available that seems to include everything that's needed. But again, I'll remove application monitoring, or only enable it for a staging server. I have uBlock set up to block trackers like New Relic, therefore it's hypocritical to include that on my own website.

As it turned out, nothing I did with my website or server was the reason for the slow performance. Instead, Hetzner⁴ had some issues with their Helsinki-based servers. A quick server speed test revealed that other locations were fast. This was the first time, I had performance issues with Hetzner. A few hours later, those issues were resolved.