I am neither a programmer, web guru, or CS person. As a user of this site, though, I often notice it is slow and often buggy. Web-pages will start to load, stop for seconds and sometimes require a page reload. My suspicion is the plethora of scripts connecting to outside servers is the problem. E.g., an incomplete list of servers I saw as part of a web-page load included scorecardresearch.com, meebo.com, quantserve.com, facebook.com, and mediaplex.com. I know some of this para-communication has to do with advertising revenue, and I accept it in return for a fee-free site. However, I encourage Danny to view these scripts with a critical eye, and only run the ones that he must. Anything more is simply a degraded user experience.
Yes, it is running pretty well right now, but when its slow, I look at the status bar as it is trying to load the page and it is usually waiting to download something from an outside server.
I have been noticing that a lot lately. Usually I am moving on before the page even completely loads. Then I get a long hold or wait on the next click wile I am redirected.
Yep, that's about what I'm getting with the same browser. I think the OP is talking about longer delays which I have gotten in the past - right now its loading relatively fast.
And it's even more of a problem on a blackberry. I've stopped trying to view PC on my BB because of the script hangup. Simply not worth the extended wait.
It's usually pretty fast on my Linux/Firefox machine, but when it does slow down it is because of poor performance from the advertising servers. Tom
I installed the Adblock Add-On for Firefox (I am on a Mac but it exists for most platforms) just to try to address this issue. I think it is helping, but not startlingly so. Certainly has not hurt. But yes, if you look at the part of your browser which indicates what files are being downloaded you see quite a few advertising sites.
I wish there was something I could do about the ad servers, but they aren't controlled by me... I guess I could try just running Google Adsense for a few days to see if that helps, instead of the combination of ad networks that we run now. I just removed the test Meebo code that I had in the templates - let me know if that helps at all.
It's too bad the script doesn't use a short timeout for the ad server code. That way if it didn't load quickly, the ad would get blown off and the page would continue to load. Tom
Thank you Danny ! The problems are intermittent, and certainly some of the time the problem will be my ISP, or stations in-between. So removing meebo is very welcome, but it is going to take time to say if it makes a difference. Along Qbee's line of thinking, would it be possible to first load the page, and then talk to the ad servers ? I don't know how much income the advertisers other than google add to your bottom line, but if it is minor then thinking about google only sounds like a tremendous idea. Again, thanks very much for listening, responding, and caring.
Slashdot has an article about just such a problem: Slashdot Technology Story | Are Ad Servers Bogging Down the Web?
Yeahh, a couple of additions to the local /etc/hosts file redirecting ad server requests to 127.0.0.1 is a very neat solution.
