TR Forums

Not sure if it's the right place to post such stuff (if it's not - please move it into appropriate section) and not sure what you guys are doing but I've been having EXTREMELY slow page loading times on most TR pages - front page, comments page for each article, forums, etc. At random times it takes anywhere from 15 seconds up to 2-3 minutes to completely load each page. I have 0 issues with every other site I visit daily - EVERYTHING loads very fast. Here is some info which might be useful:

OS: OS X 10.9.3
Browser: Chrome version 35.0.1916.153
Extensions: BetterTTV (this only works for http://www.twitch.tv pages), Hover Hound (for checking whether Newegg is trying to scam me with their prices), Send to Kindle (for sending text stuff to my Amazon Kindles).
Cache and history: completely cleaned up several times.

Random screenshot which shows the loading time for some random element on the forum page (hopefully I am doing this right):
http://i.imgur.com/UJ5zF8d.png

Random speed test taken at the same time:
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3596363751

Please fix whatever that is wrong with the site

Verizon, eh?

Yea, Verizon. Why, you think they are throttling TR due to huge amount of overall traffic it causes?

I've been having issues over the last few hours with many sites either loading at speeds that feel like a 14.4 modem, or they don't load at all. TR is loading fine for me at the moment, but bandcamp, Yahoo, FB, Ars Technica, Twitter, Google Play, and speedtest.net are barely working. I've tried different DNS servers and rebooting the router with no change. The problem is present on both my Win8.1 laptop and MotoX, so I'm thinking it's something WAN side. ISP is U-Verse in Michigan.

Maybe the net is overloaded from all the people streamimg the soccer games

When did this start?

I am not seeing any problems from here (Megapath DSL connection in the western 'burbs of Chicago). Earlier today I also accessed the site from a WiFi hotspot at the place I had lunch while my car was being worked on; that connection bounced through a SOCKS proxy on the east coast. Didn't see any issues with that either.

just brew it! wrote:

When did this start?

I am not seeing any problems from here (Megapath DSL connection in the western 'burbs of Chicago). Earlier today I also accessed the site from a WiFi hotspot at the place I had lunch while my car was being worked on; that connection bounced through a SOCKS proxy on the east coast. Didn't see any issues with that either.

Maybe few weeks ago (or slightly less), can't say definitely. And it happens pretty randomly - one minute the site might load fine, a few minutes later some page might require a minute to load some tiny image file or some other element :-/

Maybe I should test more using different OS...

Is it happening right now?

Edit: Other than a brief site outage (not slow loading, the whole site was down) a few days ago I have not noticed any issues. Sounds more like a routing or packet loss issue between your ISP and TR's.

Actually it did - a several second lag after clicking the "reply" button, though I didn't capture for how long it was :-/

I'll try to do more testing on different PC with different OS.

Edit: it's really, really weird - I tried to open a couple of TR pages in different tabs, they "stuck" on loading again for about another minute each, and while they were loading I also tried to open and then refresh random sites (Reddit, Twitch.tv, Polygon, Overclock.net, news.google.com, Amazon, AndroidCentral) in new tabs in same browser and ALL of these sites loaded in just a few seconds or so, without any significant "lag" :-/

Try running a ping of TR's server for a few minutes and see if you are getting any packet loss.

Edit: And FWIW I am using the same version of Chrome as you, but on Ubuntu 12.04.

Just a minor update - the slow loading still happens but only on my MacBook, site loads fine using desktop PC with Win 8.1 and latest Chrome for it (with same exact extensions). Still not sure WTF is wrong with that :-/ I guess I'll just try completely removing Chrome from the MacBook and perhaps try different browsers...

JohnC wrote:

Just a minor update - the slow loading still happens but only on my MacBook, site loads fine using desktop PC with Win 8.1 and latest Chrome for it (with same exact extensions). Still not sure WTF is wrong with that :-/ I guess I'll just try completely removing Chrome from the MacBook and perhaps try different browsers...

Loads fine on the Mac Mini here (using Safari).

I haven't done it on a Mac, but you can use the Chrome Developer tools (and in particular the PageSpeed extension) to narrow down what's going on when things like this happen. Assuming you don't have a misbehaving extension or some other problem like that in the browser/OS itself, it may be your DNS cache is polluted or something cross-site (typically an ad network) is timing out.

Do Macs cache DNS lookups locally? Maybe there's a DNS problem upstream of you, but the DNS caching on Windows is (mostly) masking it.