External lookup's slowing down boards.ie

dnme

Folks,

For every single page request (click) on boards.ie, the following external resource sites are included.

adserver.adtech.de
google-analytics.com
t.bmmetrix.com
b.scorecardresearch.com

Even clicking your browsers back button within boards.ie calls them. Their combined request/response times have made boards.ie sluggish.

I understand that stats have to be collated, and sponsors and ad engines have to be triggered etc but the combined load is making boards sloooowwwww. I have even tried blocking those URL's in my hosts file but no use. Any thoughts ?

amacachi

I find the adserver ones very slow (as in never doing so) to load about 10% of the time meaning the page doesn't "snap" to the last post until I click stop. It's a small thing but it's pretty damn annoying too.

dnme

another late bird eh amacachi

Conor

The current breakdown of the time taken to fully load a page on boards.ie is:

8%: The boards.ie servers build the page and serve out the HTML to your browser
49%: Your browser renders the HTML and downloads any CSS or images it doesn't already have.
7%: Your browser runs the metrics JavaScript.
36%: Your browser downloads and runs the ads.

So, if you have the sitewide average page load time of 3.3 seconds, you see roughly:

265ms of server-side time. (Depending on your browser you might start to see the page render shortly after this time has elapsed.)
1.6 seconds of your browser rendering the page.
230ms of metrics JavaScript running.
1.2 seconds of of ad loading and running time.

So yes, it's the ads that are the main problem. There are several factors that make ads slow:

1. The ads are including inline and not "post-loaded". This is something we're looking into rectifying, but we're a bit cautious about doing anything which could significantly impact on ad impressions/click-through.
2. The servers serving the ads are sometimes slow and/or unreliable. There's not a lot we can do about this except complain to AdTech.
3. The ad "creative" can be quite big to download. If you're on a page with rich/flash ads (as opposed to Google Ads) on both the 468x60 slot at the top and the 300x250 slot at the bottom the ads could be in the region of 20% of the total download size for the page. If most of the resources for boards.ie are already cached on your computer, that percentage could be still higher.
4. The ad "creative" can sometimes be expensive for your computer to render. Occasionally, ads appear which trigger bugs in some browser/flash player combinations. Where this has happened in the past (and when we can prove it) we've been able to get the ad pulled until it's rectified. It can be hard to prove though, since it's usually a relatively rare browser-flash combination which suffers.

There are also a few things you can do to get the best speed out of boards.ie:

1. Run the most up-to-date version of your chosen browser. Almost half the time it takes to load a page is down to the speed of your browser. In previous benchmarks which I did, there was anything up to a 2x speedup available just by upgrading your browser. For Internet Explorer, run nothing older than IE8. If you're willing to beta test IE9, that seems to be much, much faster. For Firefox, use 3.6 or consider testing Firefox 4. For Chrome, you should be fine, it'll auto-update. For Safari, you want version 5 or better. If you don't care what browser you use, use Chrome.
2. Turn off signatures.
3. If you can afford it, and are willing to pay for it, subscribe and turn off the ads.

dnme

3.3 seconds is very optimistic imo.
Just did a quick test (nothing too scientific), loaded boards.ie main page and it took 12 seconds. The page renders in about 3.5 seconds but the external page loads take the extra time, so the browser is busy for 12 odd seconds.

Where it becomes most annoying is waiting for the browser to reposition a page when you hit your back button, the page cannot reposition until all those external calls have completed.

I am using firefox and ie (latest versions / fixes), Win7 64 bit, 4GB Ram, Eircom 24Mbit broadband. I'm pinging game servers avg 16ms, I download at a steady 2MB from rapidshare for e.g.

Conor

Every page on boards is instrumented to record the amount of time spent on each segment (we're currently collecting 10 data points per second). 3.3 seconds is the current average time spent for a full page load. I exclude any samples more than 4 standard deviations from the mean though, so perhaps you're some edge case outside of that.

Are there any particular forums which you frequent more than others? I ask, because ads are typically targeted per forum so I might be able to track a particular ad which might be causing issues for you.

dnme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL6H-YtBL1Q

Pay attention to the status bar (bottom left). This vid shows the issue. I start by clicking refresh on this very thread. Within a few seconds the page re-renders but it takes about 11 seconds for the page to complete, reposition and hand back the browser.

Owen

+1 on the video, in fact, I made a thread on the same subject a while back. Boards can be cripplingly slow at times, purely as a result of advertising sites dragging their heels. I've had the same problem wit h3 individual ISPs, so I know it's not my particular provider.

Sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.

William Powell

I know I'm not supposed to say this but I rarely see an add. If I do see one I add the URL to my proxy servers ad block list and to the local computers InPrivate Browsing list (IE). I use the reg hack to enable InPrivate Browsing by default.

With 64kbps ISDN pages with no adds and no signatures take 7-10 seconds to load.

And no I'm not giving anyone the ad block list

amacachi

Complete disaster til about 7 o'clock, I've had to stop every page to get it finished.

Conor

Here are videos of me loading this page from both a cold cache (CTRL + SHIFT + R) and a warm cache (normal refresh):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5NpXdKpl3I

A little over 3 seconds to reposition to dnme's post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLIXSQxZUFg

A little over 2 seconds to reposition to dnme's post.

The setup for those videos is a little similar to dnme's (if anything, not as good): Firefox 3.6, Ubuntu 10.10, 4GB RAM, Magnet 10MB line (shared with about 40 people), I have a load of extensions in Firefox and I have ads, avatars and sigs turned on.

There's no "fast path" between the office and the servers either. In fact, at the moment, the connection is a bit choppy:

> ping -c 4 boards.ie
PING boards.ie (89.234.66.107) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from ip-89-234-66-107.dedi.digiweb.ie (89.234.66.107): icmp_req=1 ttl=58 time=2.44 ms
64 bytes from ip-89-234-66-107.dedi.digiweb.ie (89.234.66.107): icmp_req=2 ttl=58 time=74.1 ms
64 bytes from ip-89-234-66-107.dedi.digiweb.ie (89.234.66.107): icmp_req=3 ttl=58 time=2.40 ms
64 bytes from ip-89-234-66-107.dedi.digiweb.ie (89.234.66.107): icmp_req=4 ttl=58 time=71.2 ms

--- boards.ie ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.407/37.542/74.111/35.134 ms

> ping -c 4 adserver.adtech.de
PING glbad.adtech.de (64.236.124.228) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 40ec7ce4.rppp.aol.com (64.236.124.228): icmp_req=1 ttl=240 time=25.0 ms
64 bytes from 40ec7ce4.rppp.aol.com (64.236.124.228): icmp_req=2 ttl=240 time=25.2 ms
64 bytes from 40ec7ce4.rppp.aol.com (64.236.124.228): icmp_req=3 ttl=240 time=25.1 ms
64 bytes from 40ec7ce4.rppp.aol.com (64.236.124.228): icmp_req=4 ttl=240 time=25.2 ms

--- glbad.adtech.de ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 25.072/25.153/25.205/0.124 ms

As for the average user, well, here's the graph of the data for the last 24 hours:



That's the average gathered from thousands of users of the site. I can (with a lot of work) reduce the green portion and a bit of the blue. I can (by trying to persuade the sales & management people that they don't need some of the metrics gathering) try and reduce the orange portion by a bit. I have the least control over the yellow portion. I can't turn off the ads (they pay my salary) and I can't force AdTech to serve the ads faster. Ross and I are going to try and reduce the impact of the ad slowness (by changing when they render), but that may not help enough for you to notice a difference.


To summarise:

I totally believe you. You're having problems with the speed of the site. Unfortunately, a) I can't replicate it reliably* and b) the metrics I'm gathering show that my experience is more common than yours, i.e. most people see a full page load in around 3 and a half seconds.

With the information I have to hand, there's very little I can do to diagnose the problems you're having, much less fix them. To fix your problems, I need to know why the ad servers are responding slowly to you and not to me but I don't have enough information to do that. I can go to AdTech and say "your ad servers are slow, fix them" and all they're going to say is "no they're not, prove it" and I can't prove they're slow until I can get an easy replication of the problem with proof that it's their fault and not mine.

* I see the problem occasionally, but it's typically at home when I'm saturating my internet connection with multiple parallel downloads of large files.