Speed Improvement?

[Dani]

Have you noticed a speed improvement in page load time today versus over the past few days/weeks? (Especially when related to advertising)

[John A]

Yes. Before it took me about 30 seconds to load the page with ads, 5-8 seconds without ads. Now with ads it takes a bit more than without (still about 5-8).

It seems like the ads are loading more independantly of the rest of the page, however one ad that seems to be slowing the whole thing up a bit is Google's.

[christina>you]

I haven't noticed any speed difference.

[Dani]

Does that mean it's always been slow and still is or it's always been fast and still is?

[christina>you]

It's always been fast.

[MidiMagic]

I can read the posts before the ad loads.

But the moving pictures are just as annoying as ever.

[jbennet]

What happens is this (in my case)

Loads ok up to the thread titlre except for the navigation buttons, the silver ones that say coffee house etc... - they load up slowly one by one.

The the poll loads, each bar comes out really slowly one at a time.

Then it hangs for ages at the first set of google ads.

Then after a while the Advanced Reply button appears

Then the rest of the thread loads

Then after some more time the quick reply box shows up

Then IE usually stalls for a few seconds.

[Dani]

Is the rest of the web speedy for you? I can find no explanation why even the silver nav buttons would load up slowly one by one, considering they're the same buttons on every page of the site, so should be cached. This seems more like something on your end, since you're not just saying that everything hangs just where the ads are, but rather that all page elements come up slowly.

[jbennet]

Its the ads that seem to make the difference. Sometimes i can really quickly see the IE loading bar flashing up with http://ads.doubleclick.net/...

[Dani]

When the IE statusbar flashes with ads.doubleclick.net very quickly, that is an indication that the ad server was contacted, found, and the ads were downloaded. The problem is when the IE statusbar hangs at that point, and is unable to get past contacting the ad server (The problem seems to be that the ads are transferred quickly, but the bottleneck is in the ad server's DNS server).

[jbennet]

yeah, thats what i tis. It flashes repeatedly. The end of path is a string of numbers and that changes evrery time. Eventually it loads ok

[MidiMagic]

The bottleneck is that doubleclick oversubscribes its service. It has done this for years. When too many ad requests come in at once, its servers get overloaded, and one of the following happens:
- The router nearest the servers can't contact one. (404 error)
- The server doesn't answer some of the requests. (Timeout)
- The server takes too long to download, slowing the page load. (slow)
- The server takes so long to start downloading that the browser times out. (Timeout)

Kicking these clowns off is the only solution.

[Dani]

The banner advertisements aren't being delivered by DoubleClick - DCLK is just acting as an ad rotator, selecting the appropriate server to contact for the actual ads.

Also, from what you folks have been telling me, the slowness problem has existed for awhile, and we first started using DoubleClick about a week and a half ago.

[jbennet]

Its better/faster after what you did earlier , Dani.

[MidiMagic]

Also, from what you folks have been telling me, the slowness problem has existed for awhile, and we first started using DoubleClick about a week and a half ago.

I have been seeing it here for months. If you weren't using it, your advertisers were.

DON'T use it. It is always oversubscribed.

If there were a way to phaser it into oblivion, I would do it.:)

[Dani]

I'm not going to say that our advertisers never use it ... but that's something I have no control over, unfortunately. However, I just went and pinged their server and ping time was < 10 ms.

[Dani]

Just to add, right now none of our advertisers are using DoubleClick.

[jbennet]

And its fast.

[MidiMagic]

It's slow again.

[jbennet]

Dani is supoosed to be rewriting the slow parts of the forum over the upcoming weeks.

[Dani]

Upcoming weeks? You're crazy if you think I have that sort of patience. :) I've been pulling all-nighters since Saturday and working all day, as well, and everything will be going live tomorrow.

[jbennet]

You said two weeks last night?
Or maybe it was two days...?

[christina>you]

The site has been going very slow today. I guess it might be due to the website change?

[Dani]

The new style is requiring your browser to re-download all of those images you usually have cached, the web server is sending out the monthly newsletter to 150,000 people, and we switched ad servers ... all today. :)

[christina>you]

Wow. I see! =p

[Dani]

Oh ... and usually my post cache makes showing threads quicker, but because the CSS classes changed, I had to clear it out, so it will take a few days before it repopulates itself.

[jbennet]

Yay its much faster and nicer!!! well done dani!!! . Still a few bugs thiugh that ive noticed (the ones i spoke to you abkout)

[MidiMagic]

It is AWFUL now! It is freezing my browser with the hourglass icon for up to 30 seconds with each page load.

[jbennet]

Its much better for me. What browser do you use

[~s.o.s~]

Problem is more prominent in FireFox.