Mumsnet site slow? Problems with Ads?

[YetMoreTech]

For some users, Mumsnet is slow. It's a problem with the advertisements.

It's only a problem for some people and not others; what we need to try to do is pin it down a bit more. Lots of people have no problem whatsoever, but clearly a not insignificant number do have a problem. We'd love to help those that are having the problems, but to do so we need to get some more information.

What would be really helpful is if people could let us know the following information if they experience a problem. If you don't know the answers to all the questions don't worry, just answer those you can.

Operating System - Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, NT, Vista? Mac OS X? etc.

Age of computer (particularly if you don't know what Operating System you're using)

Browser Version - to find this if you're using Windows, go to the Help menu and click About Internet Explorer, or About Mozilla Firefox (if you're using a different browser you probably already know how to find out the version). If you're using a Mac, go to the menu to the left of the File menu which will be the name of the browser, and choose About.

Kind of internet connection - dial up modem, ADSL, cable modem, office connection, etc.

Any other information that you can provide might be useful too.

If we can see a pattern in it then we will have something to talk to the ad serving company about.

windows xp
approx 5 years old
7.0.5730.13
broad band

earlier it stuck on opening products where the sainsburies ad was..it wouldnt do anything, not even go abck?

sorry, with virgin media and using IE

computer- less than 5 month old Vista home premium
Cable boradband- virgin
IE 7, but same problem with friefox

Should have said that when a page is slow to load, theessage in the bottom left hand corner refoer to ad double click and quantum something.. if it slows down any more I will have time to write it all down!
Ok- ish tonight tho'

windows xp
3yrs old
internet explorer
virgin broadband

pages keep going white and taking ages to load.|It happened last night as well so i logged off !!!

Thanks for all these. Keep 'em coming; it's very helpful.

At the moment there appears to be no pattern, but if we get more data points perhaps we'll spot something. It's weird - I've had it happen to me on just one single occasion whereby a page stalled for about 30 seconds whilst loading an ad at the top of the page. It could just be chance, but some people have persistent problems which would suggest there is some pattern to it.

my pages are taking a lot longer to load than 30 secs when it happens tech.more like 90 secs to get the page up !!

Horribly slow yesterday.

Imac G4 about 5 years old running OSX 10.3.9.

Using Firefox 2.0.0.14

Virgin Media cable modem

Put Adblock Plus on and it went like a rocket.

errmmm, from my hosts file its adtech.de and atdmt.com that pissed me off enough to block them.
OSX Leopard, core 2 duo, 4Gb RAM
Connections : sky (16Mb) or 2MbSDSL or 10Mb.. ;-)

To be fair though, mostly the load times never seemed to do more than double (from about 2 to 4 seconds). The days of http 500 messages seem to have gone.. ..which is nice..

...on a picky point - it took 98 requests to load this page and all its assets.. ..seems a little high, especially as some of the images that get preloaded are never used for topic stuff.. ...I'll shut up now..

An Imac G4 sounds like a horrifying mixture of a shaver and a chubby classical-lite boyband.

Mine is slow loading pages sometimes and it's a quite high spec pc. Dh built it from decent, new parts.

Vista

Few months old (dh just rebuilt it)

IE 7

ADSL with a cisco router with ukfsn

I only have problems at certain times of night, so suspect it is more ISP capacity problem.

Just for balance though will give details.

Vista
1 month
Mozilla/5.0 and IE 7.0.6000.16643
Karoo Broadband, ZyXel p-600 router
No ad-blocker

GeekBoy, not sure why it's taking you 98 requests. Mine takes 49 and 33 of those are images, all of which are cached (and we're doing away with some of those soon).

A page like this one actually downloads 18K of HTML that can't be cached and everything else is either cached or ad related. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

Everyone else, thanks for the additional information. Don't stop now!

Unquiet Dad - its called Internet Explorer....am I looking at the right thing or are you quietly pysl at this??? ha ha!

PiJC- you are looking at the right thing. At the top of your browser window you should have a help option. Click that and then select 'about Internet Explorer'. The screen you get next will give you the version number.

YetMoreTech - not sure if this is relevant to this discussion but concerns adverts so ....

Main advert, top right of open thread window, keeps coming up with the following message:

"Not Found

The requested URL /flashtalking/ftlocal.html was not found on this server."

Had it at least 20 times today.

SaintGeorgeasaurus, that's interesting. However, I don't follow how/where the message is appearing - any chance you could do a screengrab and email it to tech at mumsnet.com next time it happens?

Will do

'The reqested URL/flashtalking/ftlocal.h was not found on this server' came up a few times today.

This message shows where you would normally see an advert on the right hand margin at the top of the page.

Don't know what screengrab is.

Very very slow this evening, been timed out a few times.

HTH

Whoops, there it goes.

Screen grabbed and on the way to MNHQ

I had the same as saintgeorge, one of the adverts didn't come up and said not found.

Thanks St. G. Got it. Now I see what you mean. That's definitely a problem at the ad serving company, so we'll forward it on to them. Or rather, I'll get BigTech to do it...

Operating System - XP

Age of computer - 3-ish years (and it's a bit crap in general, so might not just be the ads' fault)

Browser Version - IE7

Kind of internet connection - cable modem.

Whoops, sorry - NTL broadband.

I did it!! Yayy!!!

Its 7.0

Operating System - Windows XP

Age of computer - 6 years

Browser Version - 6.0.2900.2980

Kind of internet connection - mobile broadband, o2

i had to stop using MN as the homepage as dp was going ballistic at how long it takes to start up, we don't have this problem with most other pages.

we use lots of antispyware and pop-up blockers so i get hardly any ads at all.