Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Site stuff

Join our Innovation Panel to try new features early and help make Mumsnet better.

See all MNHQ comments on this thread

Original poster

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

93 replies

WideWebWitch · 24/03/2008 14:42

When I go to click I often get messages like

transferring from ad.adviva.net
and the like

It's REALLY slow, other sites aren't, is it me or mumsnet?

OP posts:
Original poster
WideWebWitch · 24/03/2008 14:43

ad.uk. doubleclick too

OP posts:
JackieNo · 24/03/2008 14:43

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

3NAB · 24/03/2008 14:45

I find it really slow too atm

CrackerOfNuts · 24/03/2008 14:46

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

MNHQ
AbbyMumsnet · 24/03/2008 15:39

I'll flag this up. Are you aware of any specific ads causing problems?

NomDePlume · 24/03/2008 15:41

mine's not slow

3NAB · 24/03/2008 15:42

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.

Original poster
WideWebWitch · 24/03/2008 16:23

Hi Abby, no, not particular ads to my knowledge but I get lots of messages on the bottom left of my screen saying ads.adviva.net etc etc, all seem ad related and mn is so slow I just give up sometimes. Thanks

OP posts:
Original poster
WideWebWitch · 24/03/2008 16:23

ad.doubleclick.net just then

OP posts:
VictorianPASqualor · 24/03/2008 16:31

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.

Bouncingturtle · 24/03/2008 16:34

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

3NAB · 24/03/2008 17:08

Mine does nothing when I do refresh

the circle just keeps going round

JackieNo · 24/03/2008 17:10

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

GeekBoy · 25/03/2008 13:10

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..) ;-)

nannynick · 25/03/2008 14:31

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.

nannynick · 25/03/2008 14:49

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?

Sidge · 25/03/2008 14:54

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.

GeekBoy · 26/03/2008 09:54

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..

CantSleepWontSleep · 26/03/2008 09:56

The site is fast for me, but I have an adblocker installed (though I understand that MN would prefer if we didn't all do this).

GeekBoy · 27/03/2008 09:44

Took a look last night and it definitely doesn't look like it's ads that are slowing things down..

nannynick · 28/03/2008 09:59

I think server load, on the mumsnet servers is certainly likely to be part of the issue. Stripping scripts down to their bare minimum may help a bit and allowing scripts like engine.js to be cached, even if it has to be refetched once per day, would be better than fetching it every time (geekboy, do I have that right, do those cache settings mean that the browser is fetching that file for every page view?).

The ads appear to me to be served from multiple servers... I think it may work along the lines of... adnetwork provides a script which mumsnet puts on their site. The adnetwork script, then adds to the HTML code, additional scripts to enable ad-tracking, and telling the browser the ad content type (jpg, flash, gif etc) and then fetching that image data from the ad-hosting companies server. The adnetwork and ad-hosting companies may well also be splitting the load across many servers, so the code could be telling the browser which server to obtain the data from.

Anyone in the on-line ad industry who can explain how this works? Do I have this right, or is it even more complex?

oggsfrog · 28/03/2008 10:10

Most of this thread is going over my head.
Due to my sllloooooooowwwwwwww dial-up connection we average a connection speed of 14.4 Kbps so everything is slow, but, MN is very, very, very, very slow. I can't give you a particular time when it is slow as it is slow all the time.
I tried blocking ads (I know the powers that be don't like us doing this but needs must) but it has never worked for me.

oggsfrog · 28/03/2008 10:12

Can't get broadband as we live so far from the exchange.

nannynick · 28/03/2008 10:41

I'm getting about 460kbs, sometimes faster (according to speedtest.net) from a mobile phone connection. It's costly and coverage is patchy, but may be an option if you did ever want a faster connection.

Just did a ping test to various adnetwork domains... and ads.adviva.net did not respond at all. The current mumsnet page I am typing this on, when that loaded, it did get a response from that server...

document.write('');

So perhaps the server is not accepting a PING or it was working, and now isn't.

It could be this type of thing which is giving the slow down.

nannynick · 28/03/2008 10:42

opps, meant 460Kbps