I have plain ole 1.5meg ADSL.
Also, using fireFox's "FasterFox" Extension I get an average page load from this site at about 25-30 secs. And it shows the file waiting to load as pagead2.googlesyndication.com. Once that comes in the site completes.

In IE it just partially loads, then say "done" about 30 secs later it finishes.

I had the same issue when I recently added Amazon's add service to my site. The page would pause during loading to get their ads. It was even happening when I loaded the page from localhost.

I'm going to play with the idea of loading the ads deadlast on the page then using javascript to take the ad code and write it where I want in the page using div.innerHtml. Hopefully, that will allow all my content to load and then the user won't notice the ads are waiting to load at the bottom.

It's a bit slow here - ads pop in fine. Seems to be waiting on gravatar... and at times either one or more of the gravatars don't load.

Something just changed... works well now?

Hi Ray,

Checking here from Ireland on a 3 meg line and Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox. I get the same results as you. About 20 secs to load the right and body section. Header comes in instantly. I havent seen this on other sites using Google though (Such as Digg - Same type of ads)

Dan.

Loading slow for me, has for a few days now.
I'm on a 3 Mb fiber connection.

Strange, after the last comment posted and the page refreshed, the whole thing came in instantly. Something seems fixed :-)

Robert, to be clear, it is NOT 100% of the time, even for me. I'd say it happens 70% of the time.

Btw - in case it wasn't clear - I am definitely sorry this is happening readers!

I'm on a fiber line here at my office and it's taking over a minute for this page to completely load in Firefox OS X. The status bar hangs on "Transferring data from pagead2.googlesyndication.com" for a bit, once the Google Ad loads then the post and comments load and it hangs on "Transferring data from www.google-analytics.com"for a bit then it reads "Waiting for ray.camdenfamily.com" for a few seconds.

I think that when content in a DIV container is being drawn to the screen, if the renderer hits a delay while waiting to resolve a resource such as google ads, then all further rendering will halt until the request for the resource has been returned.

I think TABLE doesn't suffer from this.

I'm using Firefox with the Adblock extension that filters out all of the Google ads and I am still seeing delays loading the site and it started a few days ago. I have loaded the site a few times now and have seen it waiting on technorati once, googlesyndication a couple times and once it was google-analytics. I also see it happening about 70% of the time and it seems to happen in groups of slow for several hits and then okay for a few reloads. I'm on a dedicated 10MB circuit for our office location that feeds back into an OC3 private backbone network.

I'm running Firefox 1.5.0.7, on a 10mbps line, 15 hops away from your server, and the only thing that seems to slow down loading today are gravatar and google analytics.

Firefox 1.5 / DSL 3M via VPN.
Most of my visits are fast, but I just got this:

"Transferring data from www.google-analytics.com"

I stopped the download after 45 seconds.

Terry

P.S. Interesting that my VPN connection through my company was blocking your captcha?? I dropped VPN and the captcha came right up.

I think the problem is with the gravatars.
I just viewd the page visit using Tamper Data. All of the gravatar requests took 30seconds +.

Since there are a limited number of threads per page, that is delaying google ads as well.

Terry

Ray,

Your site is slower. I tested in IE and Firefox.

I am going to propose this now, and see if anyone likes the idea. Someone should start an ad network for ColdFusion or programming sites. Adsense is dependant on Google to do a javascript response to your page as it loads. If the ads could be syndicated through the same server that is displaying the page, the response would be a lot faster, and Google would not be able to hoard all of the ad money.

Just a thought,
David.

I am using FF 1.5.0.7 at work with a T1 connection. The site sporadically hangs for a few seconds then loads the content. But the content does appear, I don't get any error messages.

I am using FF 1.5.0.7 at work with a T1 connection as well. Until today, I have only occasionally noticed issues with gravatars loading.

Today, I refreshed your this page several times and I am noticing messages consistently from googlesyndication and from technorati every so often.

It's only the middle part that hangs, if you look at the right side (below search) you will see the Google Ads right away

A few comments:

Gravatar - Yes, gravatar is sucky (one reason why I hope to replace it soon), but I see the myserious pause even on non-gravatar pages, like the other tabs above.

div: I can see how this could happen - however - I switched to an all CSS site a good two months ago. Why would it just come up now? I _could_ completely redesign again if I had to. Or even go to the standard install BlogCFC look. (No one comes here for the looks, right?) But I'd rather not if at all possible.

I'm seeing the same thing as everyone else, waiting on google. I noticed it today when I came to the site and your Jerico post was at top, I thought it was just my connection though since I've been having some problems with Google in general lately. However now I'm thinking maybe it's Google and not my connection. I'm on two load balanced T1's with two different providers, Sprint and Qwest. Using Firefox.

So get this. I'm testing locally using the About Me page. This page has one google ad on the right. The page content is bare. When I load, it immidiately grabs the Kalatar open source CF ad page. But then I have the exact same pause. So if Google is slowing it down - I can't image why since the ad is rendered immidiately.

Btw: I heard back from Google tech support. They are saying that since they can't replicate it, they think the issue is on my machine. I wrote back and asked them to _please_ look again at this url as there are obviously quite a few people having the issue.

I'm willing to admit that it may indeed be the layout here - but I just can't imagine why it would have started just this week.

I'm seeing a couple of things:

technorati is not loading for me...

It just came up will I was typing this. Now your page is fast again.

This is an old post but might have some bearing... http://forums.digitalpoint....

It's the google-analytics.com that I seem to be waiting on when loading the page.

Hey Ray,

Here two possible solutions:

1. You can try is to wrap a DIV around the Google Adsense Javascript code and set the style.display to "none" by default. This prevents the code from being loaded with the rest of the HTML. Then when the page is fully loaded you change style.display to "block" to start showing ads.

2. One other things you can try is to have a DIV on the place you want to show the Google Adsense but leave the DIV empty. Then when the page is fully loaded you use innerHTML to full the DIV with the Google Adsense Javascript code to start showing the ads.

One of these solutions should fix your problem :-).

Kind Regards,

Erwin Verdonk

Ray,

It didn't start just this week. I have been having this problem w/ your blog for... I dunno, at LEAST a couple of weeks, maybe as many as three.

The weird thing is that its not consistent. 90% of the time when I visit your blog, its fine.

Neil, would you say you had this since the new design, and not before?

If so - bye bye all CSS displays. I swear - I know that "All CSS" is "better", but time and time again I find situations where it just breaks down.

Ray, for what it is worth, it can NOT be your site! It must be either your stats or Google Adsense. Both can be fixed with Javascript as described in my previous post.

Regards,
Erwin

Guys - I did some testing locally with the "hide the ads" test and using onLoad to reshow the ads. This SEEMS to work, but does a bit of 'content jerking' on load. But - thats better than waiting. I'm going to deploy this change when I get back from picking up my son. Again - I'd appreciate some help testing when I'm done.

Note - I definitely appreciate everyone's help, ESPECIALLY since this is just for my ads. I know most folks hate ads - but I'm happy no one has (yet) ripped me a new one for not just removing the ads.

Again - thanks.

I'll post when I have the change up.

I agree it's not this site. Your web server is responding normally to requests, my browser is waiting on google-analytics and gravatar. (in a datacenter with multiple fiber drops to multiple backbone providers so certainly not a connectivity issue on this end)

Hi Ray,

Glad it appears to solve the issue. I got another question. Since when are you using gravatar? I notice in my HTTP debugger that gravatar often fails to load and thus slows down the rendering of your page since it has to timeout first.

This might as well cause the problem instead of stats or Google stuff.

Regards,
Erwin

Ray, I've noticed intermittently since the start of your new design that it sometimes renders very slowly. Sometimes the pause occurs before the left column renders, and sometimes it's the gravatars that take too long to load. My guess is that there's something in your CSS layout that's the source of the issue. It may have to do with slow response times from Google or Gravatar.com, but I personally think that the solution lies with your CSS. Have you tried testing two pages with identical content, identical ads, and identical gravatars, but one with tables and the other with CSS?

Gravatar was added a few versions ago. I've been talking about replacing it. The idea is sound - the server behind it is sucky. I don't mean to rip on them - but they don't seem to have any plans to add to their infrastructure.

Ok - I am uploading my change in 60 seconds. If folks could test again, I'd appreciate it.

Hi Ray!

The Google Ads appear nicely when you tell them to. However gravatar is acting up real bad and keeps loading the site for a couple of minutes before it gives up and runs the onLoad.

Maybe it is a good idea to let go of gravatar.

Regards,
Erwin

After a few page reloads, this does seem to make the content render a whole lot faster. I'd call your change a success!

Ray, that's actually been a problem for quite some time. I assumed you were aware and already working on it. Well, glad that you are now! :)

It's all time really. A friend and I have plans for it - we even have a domain. I just need to code it. As I said - I think Gravatar is a good idea in general - they simply are just not doing a good job. Now I'm sure it is hard to keep up with demand - but shoot - if you can't - you should just quit. (Which may be a bit harsh.)

For now the fix seems to deal with the issue and your site appears to load pretty normal again.

Thanks all. Again - I know in terms of the blog as a whole this was kind of an unimportant issue - but I do appreciate it.

So - me thinks I owe some kind of CF related post now, eh? ;)

Oh, and I've turned off the gravatars.

Feels like a roller coaster! ;-)

What was the fix?

You can view source to see it. I used style="display:none" and added id="ad1" (or id="ad2"). Then my onload calls a func to change the display prop to block. I also turned off Gravatars.

In IE there is a Javascript error when onLoad is being executed. Probably because the variables and ids have the same name. I think you can solve this by either choose different names or use var when declaring variables.

Regards,
Erwin

Thanks. Fixed. My JS is a bit rusty.

var your variables?? What a novel idea. :)

just had to do it.

Saw it yesterday (sept 21) at work. Thought there was just a problem with your server. Tried coming back three times during a 5 min window. Don't know what kind of line they have but I've had dl speeds of 900+ k per second from versiontracker.

Loading slow for me as well. Cable connection, firefox 1.5

Still see the problem if I reload a page a few times I can get it happen going from a fast page load to 20-30 seconds. DSL (3mbps).

I've seen it slow a few times myself, but it seems to be a lot more rare now.

I'm convinced this is a combination of CSS+JS.

Anyway, I just got another email from Google and they haven't given up. They are looking into it which makes me believe that we all convinced them this was a real problem.

Thanks again everyone.

Even though you are already convinced that it has something to do with CSS+JS, I can assure you that is can not be either of them.

The origin of the problem are the external scripts that are being used on your site. Blogbeat is often very slow in its response as well is Urchin from Google analystics. Without these trackers and no external scripts your site will load like a rocket, of that I'm 100% positive.

See what you want to do with this advice. Its just a shame when you get rid of a design/layout that is perfectly fine.

Think about it...

To be fair, I didn't mean _just_ the layout, I meant the combination of them. I certainly never saw this in the past. Although it IS possible it is a coincendence.

Why dont you get rid of all your trackers and external scripts (also Google adsense) and use it this week and maybe the next? See how it goes :-).

I got rid of technorati today. As for adsense - hey - how else am I going to afford school for my kids? ;)

True, we cant steel from kids! Alright leave the Google Adsense. At least get rid of Blogbeat and Google Analytics, for now.

Most of the time when your site is loading slow I see one of these two loading in the statusbar of FireFox.

Did you also have both of them with the previous site?

Yep, I did. BlogBeat provides much nicer anayltics then google. "Nicer" as in it is a heck of a lot quicker to see what is going on.

In might be a coincident then that it slows down your site now. Maybe one of them got server issues lately.

Still in your position I would remove all external scripts except Google Adsense to see how it runs. More than trying to guide you in solving this issue I cant do. I dont want to push you in any direction.

If in CSS you are calling an image for a backgorund, etc. that doesn't exist. This slow load time can occur on Firefox and Safari. I would carefully look through your CSS for anything amiss.