Page Loading Problems?

I've heard from three people today, including both my brothers, that they can't get AVC to load today.

I thought maybe it was a typepad issue, but I had no problem loading the blog and neither did a bunch of other people.

Then I thought maybe it's a browser issue, but it loaded fine in Firefox and Safari and people tell me it loads fine in IE.

Then my brother suggested that maybe it was a content protection/firewall issue. It made me wonder if AVC got blacklisted or something.

I realize that if you are reading this, you probably don't have the issue, but if anyone has experienced this problem today, I'd love to know what you are seeing and if you are trying to access from a protected network like a corporate network or a hotel network.

Comments

[Lance Weatherby]

My browser was returning a "feedburner error". I think they had some type of issue for a while today. The headline would try to resolve to a site and could not.

Both on OSX/Camino and XP/FF using MyYahoo as a reader.

The error was ocurring at multiple blogs.

The issue seems to have resolved itself.

Hope this helps in some way. It it happens again I will grab a shot and send it to you.

[You Mon Tsang]

Today was a weird day on the Net for me as well. Bloglines and myspace were inaccessible to me for about 30 minutes around 3:30p - 4p PDT.

Looked like DNS problems to me.

[Tom F]

Don't know if it was Feedburner or not today, but if FB's servers are slow, it can crush the performance of your blog. I reduced the number of posts on my front page because of this.

[matt schulte]

yesterday, your blog would not load in Firefox/Mac for me, I was able to load it in Safari. Today, fine in Firefox. I am at home, DSL.

[Chris Gilbey]

Tell you what is interesting is YouTube being down and then the collateral damage of looking at your blogs with the big pieces of white space where a YouTube vid is supposed to be!

[scott]

It's certainly to do with all of the "bling".

First, I did an HTTP trace on your main page. It requires well over 300 HTTP requests to load the whole thing. That, in itself, does not "cause" slowness, but it's just the first point I wanted to make. But the fact is that those 300 HTTP request took over 1 minute to complete on a 45 Mbps connection. That's pretty slow for a single web page to load.

The second point is that most of those HTTP calls are distributed over numerous service providers and, by extension, "hosts". This means that each hostname must be looked up by the DNS client on the requesting computer (the user's PC). DNS can be flaky and has been for a few sites recently. But even when operating optimally, each request takes a little bit of time. So each little bling item you add requires numerous extra queries by the client computer.

When even one of these name lookups fails or has a delay, it generally causes the whole page to load only partially or, in some extreme cases, not at all.

Each additional widget or bling introduces more chance of this happening -- just like adding more disks to a system means one is more likely to have a failed disk.

By my count, my computer had to look up 37 different hosts just to load the first page. Once they have all been successfully looked up, the DNS client (and local DNS server -- long story) on the user's computer (or network) generally caches the results and subsequent requests can go to the web servers without having to do the lookup first. That explains why you don't see any noticable issues -- you've already looked up all the hosts.

I've noticed some inefficiencies in the way publishers, ad services, partners and the like have set up their services, but there very well may be good infrastructure or service reasons they have done it, so I'll reserve comment on that and just assume they know what they are doing.

That being said, I don't have much in the way of suggestions on how to speed all of this up if that is your intent.

You could investigate each service to see if they offer a more "static" presentation method -- one that, say, caches the output in a little pre-defined Typepad template and updates in the background via RSS every x minutes instead of each time the user hits the site.

Or you could go on a bling diet. ;)

Regards from Austria (I've got to get back to work!),

Scott

[Berkay Mollamustafaoglu]

works fine with FF but not with IE as you've noticed. The error message in IE is:
"offsetLeft is null or not an object"
Line:518
On the page, last printed section is the header of cocomment (may not mean anything)

Hope this helps,

Berkay