The page load performance of BMG has been getting worse and worse over the past few weeks. For some time now, I’ve noticed that when I open a thread, I’ll get just far enough into the comments to start reading when some background activity will finish and the entire layout changes. That is annoying, but only an annoyance.
More recently, though, each and every reload has slowed to a crawl — as in seconds and often tens of seconds of a blank screen before I see anything at all. I note in the browser status bar that I see references to cdn.api.twitter.com, apparently doing a counter. Firebug reports a spinning wheel after minutes — perhaps a missing timeout? I also see references to something like “static.facebook” going by.
I’m wondering if this is specific to me or if it’s more widespread.
Update on 6-May-2013:
This problem is getting worse. The server just dropped a comment I attempt to post, after stalling for minutes. I see status messages about both facebook and twitter. Those calls almost surely can and should be wrapped in timeouts so that they are bypassed when their respective targets are unresponsive.
bmg getting much traffic bc of marathon bomber i bet
But I sent a note to our webmaster to see what the system monitors might say. As to traffic, it has been normal the past few weeks at around 28,000-39,000 unique visitors per week according to Google Analytics.
Maybe it’s your browser?
I use Chrome and highly recommend it.
if your computer is older/slower, that could effect it. You may not want to get a new one, but could think about upgrading RAM. That’s very cheap and generally easy to do. (I just upgraded my RAM from 4gb to 8gb for $30 and it’s sped up my computer noticeably, especially when I have a lot of apps and tabs going.)
n/t
I may try chrome. The computer is not the problem — twin overclocked 3.0G i7 cpus, 6G ram, Windows 7 pro, 80G ram disk for the C drive, etc.
Except for my grading program at school which doesn’t work with it.
I see the same delays in Chrome, and my machine is idle during the pause.
malwarebytes ftw.
I’m pretty sure that if it were some malware on my machine, it would affect all sites in a similar fashion.
The delays are specific to BMG, and my CPU is idle while they play out.
… on both an iMac and a Macbook Pro as well as occasionally using Safari on my iPhone and I, too, have noticed slowdowns across all three devices and without regard to browser, particularly last week, that, in agreement with somervilletom, seem to correlate with the increased presence of twitter feeds in posts. There was a few instances of database errors also… FWIW.
It’s never been more of an annoyance but I mention it here in case it is getting worse.
Same situation w/ Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on a well-apportioned MacBook showing no similar effects on other web sites nor any non-browser performance problems.
And the first
twothree times I tried to post this, I got a message saying “Error establishing a database connection”.