Photos are taking . . .

[Norma Desmond]

<p>. . . a ridiculously long time to draw . . . again.</p>

[joshroot]

<p>Is anyone else seeing this? It isn't happening for me.</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>Nice and zippy from where I'm sitting in Maryland. Perhaps California is taxing images now, Fred? That always slows things down. :-)<br /><br />No, really - it's fine here. Acid test for me is a look at the Nikon Wednesday thread, from a computer with a browser that doesn't have any of the images cached. Presto, quickie download.<br /><br />Possible your ISP is having a bad day with one or more of their routers, and have bumped larger binaries down the food chain a bit for priority. Other media (YouTube, etc) behaving OK?</p>

[Mike Howard]

<p>The whole site is taking it's time for me, Josh, on both FF and IE. Not just the photos. I can go to any other site and no problems. Must be something hanging somewhere. This page took about 20 seconds to load completely, usually it's about 2.</p>

[patrickwells]

<p>Mine is fine. I use FF. In fact it hasn't been this fast for a while. It is usually a lot slower to load the pages and photo's than it is right now.</p>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>I just timed the current Nikon Wednesday photo thread. With 81 posts (not necessarily 81 photos) it took 25 seconds to complete. That's with my newer PC, which is very fast, but the same old low end DSL (5 mbps down/0.6 mbps up). Still very fast from my perspective. My older PC would have taken 2-3 minutes to load.</p>

<p>Occasionally I do experience site related sluggishness and timeouts, but not too often this year.</p>

[James G. Dainis]

It took me 55 seconds to load the Nikon Wednesday thread. That seems about usual or at least not unusual for me with that many photos to load. At any rate, the photos at top load first so I would have just scrolled down slowly reading the first posts while the rest loaded anyway.

[tom_mann1]

<p>It just took me 9.5 seconds to completely re-load (ie, I hit "F5" on a PC) the Nikon Wednesday thread. The speed appears to be as fast as it has ever been. </p>

<p>FWIW, I'm also in Maryland, but I have a fast fiber optic feed to the house.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>This morning, the photo pages are back to drawing with normal speed. Maybe it was something only on my end (and Michael's). But it seemed to be acting very much like the site was acting a couple of weeks ago for a while for everyone, when some photos were not showing up and others were drawing painfully slowly for most everyone on the site, except this time it was just the slowness of drawing.</p>

<p>Thanks for . . . ahem . . . most of your answers.</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>Fred: don't know if you're on a Mac or PC, but either way you should be able to run a trace route to the PN server(s), looking for signs of a slow hop along the way between you and the source of those image files. It's a way to rule out server-side performance issues, or local (to you) performance issues. If (on Windows) this command at a command prompt window:<br /><br /> TRACERT PHOTO.NET<br /><br />works for you, do it when your experience with the site is as expected, and then do it again when it's feeling slow. If one of the hops along the way is showing anything well over, say, 75ms, then you can look at the name/IP of that hop, and determine if it's your carrier, or PN's carrier, or something in between the two, in the peering cloud. I know, highly nerdy - but it can be very illuminating, as a way to rule things out, and to see what a baseline round trip looks like under normal circumstances.</p>

[tom_mann1]

<p>Hi Fred - When problems arise, you may want to check out your connection by using one of the many Internet speed tests that are available. I like http://www.megapath.com/speedtestplus/ (screen shot attached below), but they all seem to give similar results for the basic upload and download speeds.</p>

<p>Best regards,</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>PS - I just saw Matt's suggestion. It is also very good and specific to a particular IP address.</p><div></div>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>Out of curiosity I checked the Nikon Wednesday photo thread with three browsers last night, all from clean caches - including the dreaded Internut Exploder, which I try to avoid using.</p>

<ul>

<li>Firefox 14.x - as mentioned above, 25 seconds. Not bad for my ISP.</li>

<li>Chrome 21.x - 40 seconds. That surprised me. It "feels" quick, but really isn't quicker than FF.</li>

<li>IE 9.0 - It never would finish loading. There may be some tweaks that would remedy this but I'm not gonna bother.</li>

</ul>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Problem continuing, generally with threads with photos, where not all but at least some photos take up to 2 minutes to draw. I generally use Safari but have also tried Firefox with the same results. In Firefox, I get a lot of messages about ads. But don't use it enough to know how normal that is. </p>

<p>In any case, I ran the Traceroute utility (MAC OSX) Matt recommended.</p>

<p>Don't know how to interpret it. </p>

<p>If anyone can help with what it's telling me, that would be great and I'd really appreciate it.</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

[tom_mann1]

<p>Hi Fred -</p>

<p>a) WRT the tracert results, I don't see any obvious problems. The total time from your computer to photo.net is averaging around 650 msec. I did the same test, and my average time was 168 msec, ie, about 4x faster. I would expect a ratio at least that large given that I'm connected via a very fast fiberoptic network. So, to me, this doesn't look like an Internet connectivity / speed problem.</p>

<p>b) Why don't you also run the canned speed test that I suggested in a previous post and let us know if the speeds it reports are in the same ballpark as the speed your ISP "promises" to deliver. This test is a bit different than the traceroute test because it also factors in the speed of your computer. For example, it sends fairly large files to and from your computer, whereas tracert sends only a few bytes on each request.</p>

<p>c) When you are experiencing a slow-down, you should see if your computer is using either clock cycles or its connection bandwidth doing other things (eg, running a background virus scan, defragmenting your disk, running some unknown and suspicious program that's using a lot of your bandwidth, etc.). Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Macs, so I can't tell you exactly what program(s) to run on a Mac, but I'm sure someone will chime in.</p>

<p>d) Checking the performance of other browsers was a very good idea. From what you said thusfar, I don't think that differences in inherent browser speed is your problem. However, there have been quite a few previous complaints / photo.net threads about the advertisements taking (literally) forever to load. On my PC, in the lower LH corner of the window, Firefox displays rapidly changing text which tells me what it is loading at any point in time. By looking at it, it's easy to see if it has hung (or nearly hung) while loading an advertisement. If that seems to be the problem, there have been previous threads that tell you how to configure your browser to minimize this. Let us know and we can help you with this.</p>

<p>Best regards and the best of luck.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>PS - After you run the tests I suggested above, do a cold reboot on every piece of equipment in your house between you and the Internet, eg, cable modems, wireless access points, wireless range boosters, routers, switches, etc. In addition, reboot your computer, and then re-run the speed test. </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Yes, in Firefox I was getting the lower left readouts and it did seem to be hanging on the ads. Thought that was a photo.net issue. Didn't realize I could do something about it. I'll check into it. If someone here has a link to the thread that was helpful about configuring a browser to avoid the ad hangups, let me know. Thanks a lot, Tom.</p>

<p>BTW, I did run the canned speed test and the speed were less than yours but in line with what my ISP says it should be. I know my speed is good, because I do a lot of uploading and downloading of very large files and never have issues doing so. I run nothing in the background, no virus scanning, no auto back ups, etc. I only have problems with PN, no other sites or tasks. This latest problem is not something consistent, though it's been pretty consistent over the last few days and, as I said, is very similar to a problem lots of people were having a few weeks ago.</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>Fred: route times can vary with time of day, traffic, etc. But looking at a trace regularly can tell you where the bottlenecks are, sometimes. In your case, it's the handoff between Comcast and Tinet that seems to slow down. PN's server is on the far side of that, so anything that has to make that trip is at the mercy of that part of the route. Fer instance:</p><div></div>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>tinet is the bottleneck for me too, 119 ms, before picking back up again to 58 ms at pnap.</p>

[tonmestrom]

<p>that's all very nice I'm sure but the fact remains that where other sites that I visit, and that's lots of them, they all fly. PN however is always on and off. Mostly on (although usually somewhat slower on average) but every now and then very slow.</p>

<p>My average downloadspeed is between 100-120 Mbps but regularly faster, up too 200+.</p>

<p>I don't mind actually if it loads somewhat slower but sometimes it's just too much and it becomes difficult even to sign in. </p>

[john_shriver]

<p>The hop on tinet.net from San Jose (SJC) to Boston (BOS) is pretty bad. Some of that is just the speed of light (takes time to go 3000 miles), but some is probably congestion at the queues. Note also the variability of that time, which points at congestion, as the speed of light is quite constant. (The variability is waiting in line in a packet queue to get on the transcontinental fiber.)<br>

Photo.net is clearly hosted on InterNAP, which should generally provide optimal performance to most networks. They do very smart routing based on measured performance, where the Internet generally uses a simple connectivity/least-hops protocol. (I worked there for a while.)<br>

But InterNAP may be making bad choices for connectivity to Matt's part of Comcast. Or Matt's part of Comcast may have simply not bought enough bandwidth for his region. Or Inteliquent (who owns tinet.net) may just be providing lousy service.</p>