My meager understanding of the mechanics of the internet lead me to believe that sometimes, so much information is being sent that it slows down - a traffic jam of sorts. I believe this happens someplace between me and the server (?) that’s sending the information to me from the original source. That would cause a page to load slowly. That, or the amount of information that must be received by me to show the whole page is very large, so it takes some time before I get it all and the page can then be displayed. If this is essentially true, how is it that a page simply stops downloading for a while? Using IE, a little icon wheel thingy spins while the page is downloading, and sometimes, that wheel simply stops moving. I take this to mean that no information is coming into my computer at that time. Why does this happen? Is it MY computer that’s causing this? Man, I miss newspapers. Dopers? xo, C.
From what I’ve seen, I think a lot of the problem is all the advertising. Most sites these days have a number of ads, often coming from different sources. There are also those ubiquitous Facebook and Twitter et al sharing links. All of those page elements are coming from servers other than the one hosting the actual web page, and any one of them, if they’re having problems with slowness or being down, can bring the loading of the page to a screeching halt.
Part of the problem, I believe, is that so many of these pages are coded in such a way that the ads load before the page content. So just one ad failing to load can leave you staring at a bunch of ads and a blank space where the content is supposed to be.
It could be a variety of things. It could be your computer running out of memory, one of the many servers involved in sending you page elements being slow, an overly-intrusive firewall or anti-virus program, or just slow a Internet connection in general.
Install Firefox with the AdBlock extension and I would wager your load times will greatly decrease, less to load and from fewer servers. FlashBlock isn’t a bad idea either, it will turn Flash content into a play button that you can click if and when you want Flash content to load.
Also web browsers use a surprisingly large amount of memory (RAM.) If your computer is running low on memory that will slow things down as portions of RAM are swapped to the page file, which is on your hard disk and much much slower than RAM.
A typical web page contacts anywhere from 4-10 servers to render the entire page. Your browser can talk to 2 servers at a time. (This actually isn’t a hard-and-fast limit, just a generally-agreed-upon limit.) That means if any 2 of those 10 servers is malfunctioning in some way, it can stall the page load.
For well-written pages, this doesn’t delay rendering. But unfortunately, few pages are well-written.
At least that’s my guess. It’s impossible to tell exactly what’s happening on your specific computer without more information, and there are a lot of tools for HTTP debugging out there. (Fiddler is a popular one for Windows.) But you really need to know what you’re doing for those tools to be useful.
Which is why I come to the SDMB for assistance 
I thought we’d agreed to increase that number a while back. I always thought the problem is that the extra sites, usually advertisements, are just overburdened.
Its google analytics, every time I have this problem its them waiting for server contact.
IE 8 and earlier have slow Javascript engines, and in my experience when you see those “pauses,” the JS engine is chewing away on something.
I can’t speak to IE, but in Firefox and Safari on the Mac you can see the URL of what’s trying to load in the status bar at the bottom of the window. A page hangs, and down at the bottom I’ll see:
Waiting for ads.adserver.com …
What is going on behind the scenes with ad servers is really astonishing.
Targeted ads are the big thing. The ad server wants to send you an ad based on a profile that’s been built up from you visiting a myriad of sites. This tracking is massive. And of course to do all the steps necessary for specialized ads to be fed, a bunch of steps have to worked thru. Cookies checked and copied, data from cookies sent to other sites, those sites provide their info to the ad server, ad server looks up stuff in a database, ad gets fed, etc. It takes a huge amount of time, in Internet terms.
Throw in that a lot of these ads are Flash based, the load time of pages goes up by a factor of at least 10.
I was at Roger Ebert’s site earlier and quickly opened 14 tabs. My browser slowed to a crawl as all those tabs loaded.
The ad server people don’t know or don’t care about how this is slowing things down.
Blocking ads and Flash is going to become even more common.
Want to see something scary? Visit this site which congregates ad tracking info from several groups and allows opt outs (in theory) of tracking. Caution: 1. The number of companies tracking you will be worrisome. 2. The site does some stuff to access your history so it takes a while. (Which means that any site could use the same track to get into your browser history.) I had the history page of my browser (Opera) open while I visited this page. Wow.
If you have a browser with a “Do not track” setting, you may want to turn that on.
I’ve noticed lately that some sites are specifically asking me whether I want to allow tracking. I’m in England and I think this is in response to recent European legislation making it illegal to load tracking cookies without permission. Anything similar in the US?
I’m not aware of any limit to the number of connections to separate servers, as would be the case with advertising, external js, etc.
The 2 connection limit was persistent connections per server. This also means that if you use a proxy you’re creating a bottleneck for yourself.
For what it’s worth, Firefox 3 had a self imposed limit of 4 if memory serves. That was quite a while ago and browsers have only increased that since.
The UK law is separate but similar to the European regulation. It’s been in “effect” for a while but sites are only recently getting around to obeying it. Some slack in enforcement has been going on. But eventually it will apply to all UK sites.
Nothing remotely like this in the US. It’s just the “do not track” setting in some recent browser versions + purely voluntary implementation by web sites and ad brokers. The FTC is merely organizing the system. No legal enforcement.
Google, in particular hates the do-no-track feature. It was recently fined by the FTC for bypassing a feature in Safari to limit tracking and only has do-not-track in the test version of Chrome, not in the release version.
The statements from Google “Don’t be evil.” execs making it clear that a user’s privacy is of no concern to them are unnervingly direct.
Yep.
It’s all-out war.
Flashblock, as mentioned above, isn’t the only alternative, though. A Firefox add-on, Prefbar, allows me to turn Flash on and off at the top of the screen. In addition, I run the BetterPrivacy add-on that automagically kills the super cookies Flash plants in computers’ files systems, not a browser’s cookies folder or directory; I have BetterPrivacy’s timer option set to check every three seconds for new ones. There is no noticeable slowdown from using the timer option. I also have an Applescript I click on after using Flash to delete the stuff (super cookies, too?) Adobe plants in its Flash cache, along with other temporary files.
I also use Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus Pop-up Addon, Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus and Ghostery that blocks web bugs, a.k.a web beacons, Remove Cookies for Site (that doesn’t work for Google, surprise, surprise and some others) and Sanitisminau that deletes whatever you choose in its list of delete-ables.
All these except Prefbar’s Flash check box and the AppleScript that kills Flash’s cache are controlled by right-click, thanks to the Firefox add-on Menu Editor that allows me to move controls from the navigation toolbar and/or the status bar (both of which I hide to gain screen real estate) to where ever I want them, in this case the right-click menu.
Prefbar also gives me the option in a dropdown of allowing “Cookies from Domain” only. Advertisers’ cookies are blocked. The other two choices are “No Cookies” and “All Cookies.”
I turned off viewing Ghostery’s list of blocked web bugs. Sometimes there are so many the list of names, each with a line through it to show it’s blocked, could extend from the top-right of the screen to a third of the way down.
All these blocking extensions can cause a problem, though. Videos on The Globe & Mail site fail to run, for instance. But rather than turning all that stuff off, I fire up Safari that otherwise I won’t run and that I keep bare naked of any extensions. But even in that case, I have to click on a myriad of “allow” buttons that Little Snitch (think ZoneAlarm) flags, because I won’t set Little Snitch to allow them more than once. Then I quit Safari with another AppleScript that also deletes all the crap planted by the Globe or any other site I had to use Safari to visit, so trackers and cashed trackers are killed after only that one site.
The last time I checked, Safari’s privacy mode didn’t kill Flash’s super cookies, and neither does Firefox, so my Firefox Quit AppleScript includes those, too.
Does all that keep pages from stopping to load periodically?