Soooooooooooooo Slooooooooooow

[liuzhou]

Of all the sites I regularly visit, without a doubt this is the slowest. What's up?

It took three minutes to get to the home page this morning. But I've noticed this problem over the last couple of months.

Direct connection or VPN makes no difference. Just slow.

Not that I'm in a hurry. Just thought you might like to know.

[polynickglot]

I'm curious too!

[tooironic]

Really? It's one of the fastest for me.

But then again I'm not in China. Hmm.

[gougou]

Yeah, I noticed that too - both the slowness in China and the speed outside of it.

[Meng Lelan]

Maybe has to do with upcoming changes of leadership in Beijing?

[liuzhou]

Maybe has to do with upcoming changes of leadership in Beijing?

I doubt it. It has been like this for months.

[ChTTay]

I've noticed the same thing BUT only for the past 2 weeks. My VPN is broken so I can't test "outside" of China.

For me, it's almost like the website "hangs" - it seems to be loaded but then the page doesn't show. Sometimes If I click refresh the page actually full shows up ... then does the refresh like I told it too and i'm back to waiting.

It doesn't matter which browser I use or computer. I've not tried a connection apart from that in my own apartment though.

[liuzhou]

Part of the problem is that the browser spends more time looking for gravatar.com and google.com than it does looking for chinese-forums.com.

[ChTTay]

Yeah, if any website has to look up anything to do with facebook or twitter (any other blocked site) that can usually slow things down too.

[chaiknees]

Yeah, when you are behind the great firewall "Waiting for www.facebook.com" or "Waiting for www.twitter.com" in the browser status bar can cause spontaneous vomiting.

[ChTTay]

I think if you use one of those comprehensive "adblock" add ons they stop facebook/twitter stuff from loading. However, you would also remove ads from the site and any potential revenue for it's owner.

[imron]

Logged in users don't see ads, except for the sponsored links box on the front page, which isn't dependent on google/Twitter/facebook.

[liuzhou]

Logged in users don't see ads, except for the sponsored links box on the front page

Yes, but the chinese-forums server doesn't know whether I am logged in or not until it checks for the appropriate cookie via my browser. It appears not to do this until after loading a load of stuff from Google.

Then even when I change pages within the forums, it goes hunting for Google again. I can see it doing it.

[imron]

My above comment was more to say don't worry about using ad-blocking plugins with this site, because it's not going to have much of an impact. Google/facebook/twitter are used for other reasons besides ads though (search, analytics, login etc), which won't be blocked by any ad blocking stuff.

It might be possible to change this (a China specific 'skin' without such code), but you'd need to bring it up with roddy. Actually, you could try using the 'mobile' theme on your desktop to see if this makes a difference.

[ChTTay]

Google/facebook/twitter are used for other reasons besides ads though (search, analytics, login etc), which won't be blocked by any ad blocking stuff.

Ad Blocker for Firefox 11 blocks "Google Analytics Tracking Script" - is this the same thing?

[imron]

It'll block the analytics (which tells things like which country the user is from, and what browser they are using and so on), but shouldn't affect anything to do with ad revenues.

Basically, feel free to use ad-blocking software if you want (I certainly do), it's not going to have an impact on the site.

[liuzhou]

You do realise that, under current EU legislation, you are legally required to inform visitors that you are using cookies (for any reason, including advertising, analytics or whatever)? On each page!

I spent ages making my website compliant.

[imron]

That's something you'd have to speak to roddy about.

[roddy]

FWIW, average page load speeds are not what they should be, but they're nowhere near three minutes, not even when you look specifically at China. There's something else going on there, and if your VPN doesn't fix it, then I don't know what it is.

At the moment I'm hard-pressed to find much time to post on the forums, let alone tinker with the innards. Apologies.

[renzhe]

You could also try extensions like Ghostery (blocks tracking bugs) and NoScripts (blocks Javascript). Especially the former should get rid of most Facebook and Google lookups.