Possible Causes of Slow Response from PF and Solutions for Users and Staff

[JohnT89]

I am trying to connect from Italy, Reggio Calabria, from an ADSL2+.

I can open PF readily, but the page loads only from the title to the 'My Physics forum' bar: everything under this bar is gray, and my status bar says:
"Connecting to tag.contextweb.com"

Opening the forum sections, the user profiles and the threads (actually, almost every link on the site), takes a very long time (ten minutes maybe), sometimes the page remains almost blank.

Tracerouting PF shows no anomalies.
The problems is relatively new, I was able to browse PF without problems before.
The problem is only related to PF and my network works fine.

Not sure if the problem is related to me or to PF, but I tought it would be helpful for the staff to know.

Thanks

 

[micromass]

I sometimes have problems which are very alike this ones. And it's always on sundays (probably because of chat...).
What works for me is using the webbrowser Opera and switching on Opera Turbo. That's usually OK for me...

 

[dlgoff]

Greg is doing a little work on the site right now. Maybe that has something to do with it.

 

[russ_watters]

It was slow for me this morning.

 

[JohnT89]

the problem seem to be disappeared by now, thank you

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I noticed a few hangups this morning. Please keep this thread updated with your experiences.

 

[pallidin]

Been on since about 6:00pm this evening in the US; Montana.
No problems at all on my end. Everything seems quite snappy.
Just for info...

 

[dlgoff]

Greg,

I just experienced about a 5 minute period where I was getting Firefox time-out errors before finally getting to this thread. It happen at around 1.35am CST.

I checked to make sure I didn't have any checks, etc running that might have slowed my PC down; nothing except normal system and Firefox.

I'm not usually on at this time of the night so it could have been a normal PF server thing going on.

Anyway. Just trying to keep you informed

Edit: Things are fine now. I suspect a scheduled PF "server function" was what I was experiencing.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Greg,

I just experienced about a 5 minute period where I was getting Firefox time-out errors before finally getting to this thread. It happen at around 1.35am CST.

Edit: Things are fine now. I suspect a scheduled PF "server function" was what I was experiencing.

Yup, you'll hit it every time. 1:30am CST is backup.

 

[dlgoff]

Scared the crap out of me. Wish I'd had more beer. I would have been in bed.

From now on if I'm up at this time, I'll know better.

Thanks Greg

 

[JohnT89]

PF is working fine, 11:30 GMT

 

[Filip Larsen]

For what its worth: whenever a PF page has been partially but not fully loaded in my end, Chrome pretty much always say "waiting for tag.contextweb.com" in the bottom. At one time when waiting for this address took 10 sec or more on pretty much every PF page, I started to play around to see if I could filter out that address with AdBlock, but without luck.

 

[JohnT89]

For what its worth: whenever a PF page has been partially but not fully loaded in my end, Chrome pretty much always say "waiting for tag.contextweb.com" in the bottom. At one time when waiting for this address took 10 sec or more on pretty much every PF page, I started to play around to see if I could filter out that address with AdBlock, but without luck.

I experience the same thing when the problem occurs, its like tag.contextweb.com is the weak ring of the chain.

I http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=tag.contextweb.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8" tag.contextweb.com and found that PF is certainly not the only server having problems with contextweb.

I don't think you can filter it with adblock as it is probably (saw that while skimming the google results) a tracking cookie server.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I don't think you can filter it with adblock as it is probably (saw that while skimming the google results) a tracking cookie server.

Contextweb serves some of our banner ads.

 

[JohnT89]

Contextweb serves some of our banner ads.

oh ok, so don't use AdBlock at all if you love PF :D

 

[Borek]

PF is slow tonight, judging from the messages I see it is not PF server, but RSS feeds again.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

PF is slow tonight, judging from the messages I see it is not PF server, but RSS feeds again.

RSS feeds?



I have sent an email to contextweb about the slow calls.

 

[Borek]

RSS feeds?.

You must have seen it - MagpieRSS fails which triggers large series of error messages.

There was also a local call (that is, my computer waiting for some external server, other than PF, to complete page rendering). It wasn't google-analytics, something else, but I don't remember what.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

You must have seen it - MagpieRSS fails which triggers large series of error messages.

It's an error, I believe happens when you try to view a thread exactly when the RSS updates. I can look at updating it less frequent, but this should not affect speed.

 

[JaredJames]

Seeing as we're bringing up errors, I keep getting something along the lines of "Headers Failed to Load" every 20 or so threads I view.

The logo of PF appears with the navigation bar, errors above the logo and errors below the bar. Page doesn't load.

I'll write down the specifics later.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Seeing as we're bringing up errors, I keep getting something along the lines of "Headers Failed to Load" every 20 or so threads I view.

The logo of PF appears with the navigation bar, errors above the logo and errors below the bar. Page doesn't load.

I'll write down the specifics later.

Yeah that is the RSS/Cookies problem.

 

[JaredJames]

Yeah that is the RSS/Cookies problem.

Ah right.

I'd ignored so far because I thought it was a browser issue on my computer.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

please let me know if anyone has problems with "waiting for tags.contextweb.com"

I just pinged from the server and there were no latency issues.