TR Forums

Anyone else noticed this? Past couple days (I think, but for sure today) the site has been very slow. Slow for me on 3 different browsers.

Seems to be better now. Bah.

edit: maybe not. Maybe it's just my provider or something. Other sites seem to be fine though.

Tech Report's been really slow for me today too; some pages wouldn't even load this morning.

Haven't noticed it myself.

Seems fine to me. I actually noticed some slowness a couple of weeks ago, but everything seems normal today.

It's been fine for me.

I wonder if it may be one of the ads and with people getting different ads based on location some are seeing it and some are not. If it does seem slow, take a note of what ads are showing, if we can narrow it down then I know Adam will throw that ad out of the rotation very quickly!

The slowness comes and goes and is not ad-related. It seems to me as if the server-side load-balancer refers calls to something that isn't working, as a series of refreshes eventually brings the site up in normal time/speed (i.e. cycling through the load-balancer destinations).

I wonder if DNS comes into play? Maybe some providers are fooling with their DNS. Me I use Google's free DNS and have had no problems.

tanker27 wrote:

I wonder if DNS comes into play? Maybe some providers are fooling with their DNS. Me I use Google's free DNS and have had no problems.

OpenDNS here.

Captain Ned wrote:

The slowness comes and goes and is not ad-related. It seems to me as if the server-side load-balancer refers calls to something that isn't working, as a series of refreshes eventually brings the site up in normal time/speed (i.e. cycling through the load-balancer destinations).

Uh, TR doesn't use load balancers. Dunno why you're seeing what you are, but that's not the reason.

Man, I haven't noticed the site being slow in a long, long time.

It's better this afternoon but last night was really on/off, either fully slow or usual speed.

None of the staff noticed anything lately, so we think it's related to your ISP, or at most one of the peer connections to our ISP.

However, if more data can be provided, that'd be helpful:

- Does your browser read anything in the status bar, like "waiting for X"?
- Is this site-wide or related to a specific section?

morphine wrote:

None of the staff noticed anything lately, so we think it's related to your ISP, or at most one of the peer connections to our ISP.

However, if more data can be provided, that'd be helpful:

- Does your browser read anything in the status bar, like "waiting for X"?
- Is this site-wide or related to a specific section?

Browser (latest Chrome stable) reads techpreport.com in status bar. Meaning it's connected and waiting?
Site wide, even forums sometimes.

It's not consistent at all. And clicking that particular link or another link on the site seems to bypass the issue sometimes. Don't know what it is.

morphine wrote:

None of the staff noticed anything lately, so we think it's related to your ISP, or at most one of the peer connections to our ISP.

However, if more data can be provided, that'd be helpful:

- Does your browser read anything in the status bar, like "waiting for X"?
- Is this site-wide or related to a specific section?

Status bar says waiting and it was site-wide. At its worst I had to lick a link 4-5 times for the browser to even jump to the new URL.

EDIT: Now back home and it's dog-slow again, complete with needing to refresh several times just to get the URL to take. Home is Comcast using OpenDNS. Work site was Comcast Business.

I'd hazard a guess at something being up with Comcast or the connection between Comcast and our provider. I just checked, and server load is our usual extremely low and I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary. Site's been fast all day for all of us.

Ugh, troubleshooting problems like this sucks. For now I'm leaning towards Comcast, unless other users report issues.

Can you guys post a traceroute when it's slow? Just open a command line and do "tracert techreport.com" and then paste the results here, or PM to me if you're privacy-minded.

Important Notice: our provider is adding a redundant connection, so we're going to have spotty availability this morning, between 12AM ET and 4AM ET, so please ignore slowness during this period.

Slowest part right now is three hops through Cogent, but they're only 95 ms or so, and all of the Comcast hops are around 45-50 ms. Hopefully I'll get another period of slowdown when I can get better data.

Captain Ned wrote:

Slowest part right now is three hops through Cogent, but they're only 95 ms or so, and all of the Comcast hops are around 45-50 ms. Hopefully I'll get another period of slowdown when I can get better data.

Same here. I'll shoot it over to you in a PM though.

Edit: FWIW, I could trigger it earlier by clicking the same link three or four times and i'd get it to stall. That doesn't seem to be happening now. I'll see if i can get a trace when it's slow.

Still slowest through Cogent and given the router names including the string "jfkxx" (where xx is a number) I'm guessing that there's congestion in a NYC-based Cogent facility. Unfortunately Cogent routers are not part of the Internet Traffic Report so there's no outside data.

EDIT: Interesting. Transit is now through Level 3 with 70 ms latency. Comcast must have tweaked something.

EDIT 2: 30 seconds later it's back through Cogent with the same 95 ms. Ain't routing fun?

EDIT 3: For those few poor souls like me who find routing issues to be fascinating, check out http://www.renesys.com/blog

I used to work at Cisco, and I once got sent to Milan, Italy to fix IPTV just before the World Cup. At that point (several years ago) the Internet routing tables at that site were getting an update every 1-2 seconds. I was also working on the CRS when RIPE found the BGP bug in it by advertising extra attributes. BGP is scary...

notfred wrote:

BGP is scary...

And, last I knew, it's all we've got for inter-router comm links.

EDIT: Fixing IPTV in Italy during the World Cup. No stress there; no sir, none at all.

FYI Bruno, problem seems to have subsided. Haven't noticed any issues since yesterday.

a tip for some people is to look at your Internet Security software and ads.

AdChoices (who seem to be serving a lot of TRs ads) cause me slowness with Norton Internet Security at home. I see that a lot.

FWIW, I looked into this yesterday as well, it seemed to be related to Comcast's DNS servers. Since I use a local DNS server with one of the Great Old One DNS servers as a forwarder, it didn't seem to apply.

Switched to the provided Comcast ones (those are national, BTW), and saw the issue as described. Resolution calls stalled out, primarily on ads.

Forge wrote:

FWIW, I looked into this yesterday as well, it seemed to be related to Comcast's DNS servers. Since I use a local DNS server with one of the Great Old One DNS servers as a forwarder, it didn't seem to apply.

Switched to the provided Comcast ones (those are national, BTW), and saw the issue as described. Resolution calls stalled out, primarily on ads.

Whereas I was having the issue using OpenDNS over Comcast.

notfred wrote:

I used to work at Cisco, and I once got sent to Milan, Italy to fix IPTV just before the World Cup. At that point (several years ago) the Internet routing tables at that site were getting an update every 1-2 seconds. I was also working on the CRS when RIPE found the BGP bug in it by advertising extra attributes. BGP is scary...

Italy hasnt hosted the World Cup since 1990??? >.>

tanker27 wrote:

notfred wrote:

I used to work at Cisco, and I once got sent to Milan, Italy to fix IPTV just before the World Cup. At that point (several years ago) the Internet routing tables at that site were getting an update every 1-2 seconds. I was also working on the CRS when RIPE found the BGP bug in it by advertising extra attributes. BGP is scary...

Italy hasnt hosted the World Cup since 1990??? >.>

So? He was likely fixing it so they could watch it over IPTV, not broadcast... World Cup is what? every 4 years?

You're right, I read and inferred too much into the statement.

Captain Ned wrote:

Forge wrote:

FWIW, I looked into this yesterday as well, it seemed to be related to Comcast's DNS servers. Since I use a local DNS server with one of the Great Old One DNS servers as a forwarder, it didn't seem to apply.

Switched to the provided Comcast ones (those are national, BTW), and saw the issue as described. Resolution calls stalled out, primarily on ads.

Whereas I was having the issue using OpenDNS over Comcast.

Weird. Are you able to reproduce the issue now?

Forge wrote:

Weird. Are you able to reproduce the issue now?

Nope. Whatever was getting in the way no longer is.

Arvald wrote:

So? He was likely fixing it so they could watch it over IPTV, not broadcast... World Cup is what? every 4 years?

Yup. Turned up at the office and my contact took me to meet his manager. I shook his hand and he then held out his hand and said "Passport please". I just laughed it off, but later my contact told me he was only part joking

It turned out that the problem wasn't in my code, so I got to spend a week sitting in Milan watching people walk past and giving occasional updates on how the folks in San Jose who actually broke it were doing on fixing it.