PC getting S L O W E R ?

all,

I first jumped into this thread back in post numbers 31 & 36 (in case any of you have questions about my computer's setup). I thought the page load times were long back then, but today it is taking between 17 & 20 seconds to load each page. This is ridiculous!!

Ken (in Bolton,Ct)

 

It's loading pretty quickly for me, except every once in a while I get a slow load from an advertising site.

Tom

 

I was getting frozen out by an ad site that appeared to have died. So I turned on AdBlocker in Firefox, and now PC loads in a fraction of the time it ever has in the four years I have been here!

Sorry Danny. I tried to support PC by letting the ads in, but when it finally got to where pages didn't load at all I had to do something.

 

I suggest y'all go read this PDF. It's a paper from the folks
behind Google's "safe browsing" facility, and very relevant.
.
_H*

 

Some of the AD servers feeding PC are very slow. I try to let them do their work, but sometimes it's just too much.

Tom

 

I'm through with ads. I never liked the way they slowed down web sites. Then they started freezing pages entirely, and since it typically takes several pages to read a thread (go to the site, select a forum, then a thread; and to reply there's a reply page, and a submit...) it was blocking me out of PC entirely.

Now we learn, thanks to Google, and thanks to Hobbit for bringing our attention to it, that if one of those ad sites becomes infected, the ads can be working to infect our computers. And even though OS X is far more resistant to attacks than is Windows, I see no compelling reason to increase my exposure.

I repeat now what I've said before, very recently, and long ago, that as soon as Danny implements a donation or subscription option in PC I will donate/subscribe. But from now on, Adblock (which I erroneously called AdBlocker in an earlier post) remains on. Older PC members will remember that long ago there was a donate option, and I did, as did many others. Of course, if those few of us who post regularly subscribed, it would probably be a drop in the bucket compared to the much larger numbers who lurk. So I do not fault Danny for using advertising. And if ads are composed at the PC server I've got no problem with that. But ads that rely on calls to an ad server, which open us to the sort of attack documented in the Google paper that Hobbit cited, are, in my opinion, fair game for blocking.

 

I don't fault any website for trying to make money, or at least break even. What I do fault is slow ad servers. It seems to me that these guys have an obligation to serve up their sh*t in a timely manner. When they don't, the people paying them are not getting value for their money, and the rest of us suffer needlessly. Worse than that, I find myself resenting the sponsors, which isn't exactly the effect you want as an advertiser. I especially hate those drop down ads, and the stupid ones that float over the screen.

Tom

 

It might help if PC set the 'Expires' header for any static content, which would stop the browser having to make a request to the server to see if the content has changed. The server may only be responding "304 Not Modified" but it still has to process the request, it counts towards the 'two connections per site' limit that the HTTP/1.1 specification dictates, and it adds a round-trip delay to the page load.

There are a lot of little images all over the place, from smilies to the quick reply editor box to the Quote/Multiquote buttons, none of which will change frequently. Ditto lots of scripts, which possibly could be combined into one.

I count nearly 50 requests to content that never changes, when loading this reply page, and 84 requests when loading the current last page of this topic.

Setting Expires does mean you have to be careful to synchronize any site design updates, or put them at different URLs, otherwise you can get partly the old site, partly the new, but generally it reduces bandwidth and load on the server, and speeds up the client.

Another issue is that image sizes aren't always declared, which can cause some browsers to effectively give up rendering until the image actually arrives, adding to perceived slowness. HTML should always state the size of the image so the browser can fill in the box. Some versions of IE had trouble with tables - it helps the browser if you declare how many columns there will be, and the sizes of the columns, so it doesn't have to reflow while drawing.

 

That would help with overall load times and server loading, but it doesn't help much with the advertising servers. The normal content of PC loads quite fast on my machine, but I sometimes have to wait for the darned advertising servers.

That said, it's been awhile since I have experienced serious slowdowns on PC. It's been good recently.

Tom

 

Do read the Google paper that Hobbit cited above. One call to an ad server can result in a cascade of calls, bouncing you from one server to another before you get the "payload," which is normally the ad, but more and more frequently can be malware trying to infect your computer. Google is interested in the problem of trust: with ad syndication there's a long chain before you get to the ad content, and any node along the chain can direct you to a server with malicious content. But it also means that any one of those servers along the tree can be responsible for a delay if there is no mechanism to abort a call to a slow or non-responding server.

Web sites need revenue, and advertising is the traditional way to finance broadcasting, and now web sites. But the system of advertising on the internet is rapidly evolving into a morass that slows down the delivery of web pages and is easily exploited by internet criminals. The obvious answer for the end user is to block this kind of advertising. This will make it harder for web site owners, but you can hardly blame the end user when his computer slows to a halt and is more and more at risk of malware. Site owners will eventually have to find another form of revenue. Either subscription based, or originate the ads at the web site's own server. Why not have the web site's own server call to the ad servers for ads, place those ads in a queue, and when someone makes a call for a page, form the page with the ads so everything can be delivered without delays? This actually does nothing to address the malware issue, but it would eliminate the delays.

Has anyone ever seen a useful ad on a web site? I have not. Advertisers pay because ads work, so someone is buying their scams. "Free" web sites are essentially financed by suckers buying from the advertisers. It's easy to complacently accept "free" content that someone else is paying for, but the side effect is that quality of service deteriorates as the ad delivery system slows everything down, and we are all at increased risk of malware.

 

What I do.
I run a unread posts search
Click the scroll wheel on the blue button of each thread I want to read. This opens the thread in a new tab.
I then work across the tabs closing them as I go.
The next thread is already loaded waiting for me to read it.
When I go to the next page in a thread I read another tab while waiting for the page to load.

 

Similarly, I click on "view new posts", and with firefox I right click on the thread titles that look interesting and "open link in new tab". Read and close tabs as I go...

 

I do something similar, though in Firefox on the Mac it's Apl-left-click. But the other day those pages were just not loading at all! Hung on the call to one of the ad servers. No more. It took me about a minute to fall in love with AdBlock Plus.

 

As a data point, PC pages never take longer than three seconds to completely load on my system, unless there is some sort of a problem. I run Firefox on Ubuntu Linux on a 2.33GHz dual core system with 2GB of RAM. My Internet connection is a 6M cable modem.

Tom

 

With my Ubuntu box, very similar configuration to yours, similar results. Vista Ultimate with IE, sometimes it just stalls with a blank page. This happen, though less frequently, on my XP Pro machine running IE

 

The ad site that appear to slow things down for me

tag.contextweb.com

 

Two ad sites are killing the forum today:

tag.contextweb.com
payload.yieldbuilder.com

These guys need new batteries for their servers.

Tom