When I try to load a web page (such as this MB, natch) and it fails to load, what is
the difference (if any) between the following outcomes? [This is in Firefox BTW]
The page hangs and after about a minute or so you get a “timed out” message.
The page hangs forever with nothing happening-no error screen either; just keeps saying “waiting for ****.com…” but never loads.
A “blank” page eventually appears, with the accompanying little message “done” at the lower left (umm it isn’t “done” *&^% program…).
I would guess the outcomes differ depending on where the data block is occurring, but whatthehelldoIknow? There’s others which I can’t think of right now.
Best guesses based on prior experience investigating these issues:
The connection was requested by your browser (a TCP SYN sent to the server), and no acknowledgement from the server was recieved within the timeout period. The browser does you a favor and tells you up front that the connection has timed out.
The connection was requested by your browser, and the server responded (SYN ACK sent back to you). The actual page data that should start coming back from the server at this point, however, either hangs completely, or moves veeeeeery slowly. Due to the way TCP works this connection will not abort, because as each segment times out your browser will request a replacement for it, and it will continue to do this happily until either you abort it yourself or the server shuts down the connection with a reset (or the request completes properly).
A lot of things can cause this, but one possibility is that (2) from above occurs, and the server finally does issue a reset. Resets are not always a problem so your browser doesn’t display an error, it just shows you the data it has so far (probably not much).
Note that all of these are almost always a sign of an overloaded server on the host side. Usually.