Is it just me or do the ads really slow this site down?

Weird that Engine.js should take that long NN - it's only 12K and took 70ms just now. Caching would certainly help, as would minifying scripts. There's loads that could be tidied up code wise (commented code on production servers is a no no in my world). That said, running with ads does seem to add around 80% to page load time depending on the size of the ad.

Last week/week before there were also a number of http 500-13 'server too busy' type messages that went away on a refresh so it's more likely that MN are somewhere near the limit of their max number of connections at peak times... ...better caching would also help..

I have been getting this too - I thought I'd broken MN!

I find pages "stick", then won't reload or refresh. Occasionally I have to close the browser and start again.

Sometimes it is really slow to load all pages, not just huge threads.

I find it worse at around 2130-2200.

Found out what Engine.js is part of... DWR
"DWR is a RPC library which makes it easy to call Java functions from JavaScript and to call JavaScript functions from Java (a.k.a Reverse Ajax)." more details.
At a guess, I would expect that this may take charge of posting a new message - though could (easily) be wrong.

Abby - perhaps ask techies if engine.js really should be Expires=0, Cache-Control: must-revalidate. Does this file really change on a regular basis, or can browsers be permitted to cache the file for longer?

When accessing mumsnet from my mobile, I certainly can notice slowdown as the ads load.
Any chance of a Mobile version of mumsnet, techies?

On my laptop I have some software which tells me how long each element of a webpage takes to load. The HTML (the bit with the text) took 10ms. But total page load time was 3.2 seconds. Biggest delay was engine.js (techies, what is that?) which took 851ms to load.
The ads seems to be comprised of several requests - to various scripts, that then add code to the page. First Choice (160x600) ad is only 9kb Flash data size, took 591ms to load, which is LESS time than the engine.js script.
So, it may not actually be the ads which are causing the go-slow... it could be the loading of certain javascript files.

what kind of times is this happening out of interest? Posted on another thread recently about page load speeds and was hard put to find a slow one. Even assuming my connection was faster than everyone elses (which can't be right as we've got peeps here skyping and sending HUUUGE emails) I was only seeing a doubling of load time (from 1 to 2 seconds..)

Ads from view.atdmt appeared to load more slowly..

('all the time' isn't a specific time..) ;-)

And woe betide me if I try to scroll down before the page has loaded completely - it sticks for ages.

Mine does nothing when I do refresh

the circle just keeps going round

I have same as VictorianSqualor - if it sticks then hit refresh - page loads straight away.It is annoying tbh.

Mine sometimes slows down with the ads, when it says connecting to or tranferring data from ..then the ad name.
I find if I just click refresh it works fine, like it's sticking or something.

hubby thinks it is because there are more people on than the site can cope with. I check out other sites and they are fine. It is like MN jams.

mine's not slow

I have found it very slow for a while now. Several times a day I find that I can't get on at all.

I find it really slow too atm

I often find it slow too - it always seems to 'stick' on the ads.