I am seeing Lag for all the Ads to Finish

[stevech]

this is last post on the problem I see - it's clearly unique to my PC and unique to Firefox. Something changed to cause this and I've yet to deduce why.
Doesn't happen with IE since I rebooted.
15-30 second response delays for most requests from Firefox.
Same Firefox works normally on 5 other forums, and usual websites.

Somehow, it's singling out this forum's content.

Rebooted.
Latest Firefox.
Cleared cache in Firefox. No help.
Checked the short list of plugins and extensions to Firefox. Nothing new.

Trial and error from here.
Any ideas?
I'll not bother you folks more on my local FF problem with this site.

 

[sfx2000]

Last Three (3) days here, the SNB forums have a consistent 10-30 second delay from clicking on anything to a page display on my PC.

I don't think it's ad servers slowness. Even clicking on EDIT a post has the same long delay.
And watching the browser status bar, it usually says it's waiting on a response from SNB, not an ad provider.

4.2.2.2 is the old BBN (now Level3) DNS server, and might consider shifting that over to something different. Level3 doesn't support anyone outside of L3's network as far as service level agreement and performance expectations.

You've got Google DNS (8.8.8.8) as one of your current DNS - for the rest, 8.8.4.4 is Google's other one...

Consider using OpenDNS public - some folks have concern with OpenDNS, but I've found them to be fine...

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Or perhaps Neustar's Public DNS - nice alternative and very fast - lot of folks don't know about these..

156.154.70.1
156.154.71.1

One thing to consider, since you have a Synology NAS box, is run DNSmasq or BIND there as a caching DNS server, and put all six on rotation (Google, OpenDNS, Neustar, along with your ISP's primary/secondary), and then put all DNS queries to the internal server as the informative host for DNS.

 

[sfx2000]

Local DNS cache issue perhaps?

Clean up DNS Resolvers:

Windows7/XP/8/10 –

ipconfig /flushdns​

Mac

OSX 10.10.0/10.10.4 - 10.10.5 and OSX 10.11, treat as OS X 10.9

sudo discoveryutil udnsflushcaches​

OSX 10.9

dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder​

OSX 10.7 – 10.8

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder​

OSX 10.5 – 10.6

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache​

Linux (depending on what you’re running, and you might have to use sudo)

/etc/init.d/named restart​

/etc/init.d/nscd restart​

 

[john9527]

Maybe Firefox is IPv6 enabled and 'Happy Eyeballs' is disabled? Search in about:config for 'ipv' to get to the options.

 

[stevech]

Well, 4 days later, FF just started working normally with SNB's web site again. I'd done nothing more than previously described.
I dunno.

I don't think it was DNS server problem as nslookup worked fine as usual, day after day. No other web sites I visit were affected.
My wild speculation is some ad content on SNB was present and FF didn't like it. But other users of SNB who use FF didn't complain - so this isn't likely a valid speculation.

 

[System Error Message]

If you get money by showing ads (not if its clicked) than you can do better by shuffling ads actively. It may use a bit more resource and to avoid the ads staying in memory you can use a javascript container that writes itself with new ads and restrict the ads so they dont mess up such as in size and function. I hate ads where when you visit a website a video just starts playing because it is sometimes loud and really annoying but a lot of tech and computer websites use them and i really really hate it even though it is promoting either their own content, tech news and such mainly because the page loads with it playing.

 

[stevech]

I'm amazed that Google et al have such apparently huge incomes from web page ads.

Does anyone notice them? No one I've asked does.
For me and others, invasive ads are a black mark against that advertiser.
On this forum, there are not too many such ads... just the pop-over ads tick me off.
But nothing as bad as CNN and sites like that.

Web is getting to be like the all the crap-TV on the cable now, this gets worse and worse as the number of channels increases. Basic math: too many channels = lower and lower quality.

 

[System Error Message]

What google does is make ads blend into the page so they dont scream out but they also have sponsored links too. However because google has so many viewers and many use google ads on their website google is able to make money out of it because of popularity. It is also easy to accidently click an ad if it is blended in with content.

Futurama has an episode of how the internet will be like which is accurate because of how aggressive the ads are.

 

[stevech]

A simple browser refresh (firefox) - the status displayed in grey, bottom of page.. fast but a rather long list of ad sites fly by. About 8 or so.
Sometimes, as we know, an ad site is very slow to respond, and we wait.

 

[sfx2000]

Interesting - while we were talking about all this - the IAB released this post - http://www.iab.com/news/lean/

"we messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience."
​

Realistically - ads are part of the ecosystem, esp with free sites that depend on the impressions/page views - and done right, it's ok...

But as SteveCH mentioned, and I absolutely agree with him, when ads start to impact the user experience, things do get out of hand, and many will implement things to make those irritants go away...

 

[sfx2000]

Going back to the comment from IAB, they released that post on 10.15, a month after Apple put a system level API for adblockers in IOS 9...

(IOS9, just the 64 bit versions, not all iDevices, and they didn't implement that API for Safari on Macs)

Interesting application of "soft power" - it is the user experience.. and to that end, that's what Apple is all about.

This is a win-win for users, site operators, and ad providers/partners..

 

[sfx2000]

 

[thiggins]

What's the point of the screenshot, sfx?

 

[RMerlin]

What's the point of the screenshot, sfx?

He's contributing by reposting an ad, bypassing everyone's ad blocker?

 

[charlie2alpha]

Hmm, if you look at the image properly, it may be a pop-up ad, covering the screen. Those are rather annoying.

 

[sfx2000]

What's the point of the screenshot, sfx?

Sorry - the better half asked me to do something in the house - it was an interstital pop-over ad, and while the 'close' item was there, it would not respond, and it was stuck (reload page and it came back)...

Browser was Firefox 41.0.2 (Mac) - adblock disabled, ghostery in monitor mode (non-blocking) - I mention both of these, as they still run their Javascript within the browser context.

 

[thiggins]

Sorry for the problem. I haven't seen that particular one. There was a VMware campaign that wasn't obeying frequency caps that I had killed a week or so.

I would not run these ads except they pay 2-3x what other ads do. I've found if you set your browser to not accept third-party cookies, you probably won't see them.

They are such a pain in the butt, but I'd lose significant $ not running them.

 

[Chrysalis]

So you think ads on SNBForums are "wow" bad? How so?

I try to keep ads relevant and to a minimum. Yes, we occasionally get a misbehaving ad, which I kill as soon as it is reported. Try THAT with other sites.

I also have not implemented some of my ad partner's suggestions to meet new ad viewability requirements, like ads that follow you down the page and run over other content.

Is 2 or 3 seconds lag really THAT bad?

Without ads, I lose a major portion of my revenue. If I lose enough, no more SNB or SNBForums.

its your site, your rules.

but 2-3 seconds overhead on a page load that is e.g. normally 0.5 secs is significant, that would be a 700% increase in time.

 

[Chrysalis]

It's simple. When ads are blocked, I don't get paid.

Background:

The ad industry has rapidly moved from pay-per-impression (paid when ads are served) to pay-per-click (paid only when ads are clicked) to now pay-per-view.

The "viewability" model charges advertisers only when an ad is viewed. "Viewed" definition differs, but generally requires the ad be visible in the browser's viewpost for at least one second. So no ad viewed, no advertiser charged and no ad partner (me) paid.

Viewability requirements have until recently been demanded only by larger advertisers or ad networks. But with Google's recent announcement that it will only charge advertisers when ads are 100% viewable, the game is rapidly escalating.

if you are able to provide feedback to your providers, I can tell you what makes me hate ad's and when I dont mind whitelisting.

For me ad's have the following problems.

1 - they are a perfect way to transmit malware, allowing ad's everywhere in a browser is sadly a security risk.
2 - they slow down browsing, I think more of the slowdown is due to trackers than ad's, some sites only serve ads without the tracking and they tend to run much faster than sites that have trackers.
3 - some ads are too intrusive and to be blunt abusive, I would classify ads that scroll with you, or play before a video, or cover content as abusive. Likewise ad's that flash, animate etc. ad's that are text only are more likely to get my attention as they least likely to be blocked. I also dont like having to scroll to see content.

So suggestions are.

1 - place ads at the side rather than at the top.
2 - avoid ad's that move with scrolling.
3 - avoid animated ad's,
4 - keep the numer of tracker/ad sources low, I dont wanr to be doing 20 dns lookups etc. everytime I load your page, I will whitelist this site now, and post back if I think its excessive.

Thanks

Also if you added a paypal button I wouldnt mind contributing, I prefer that to forced ad's.

--edit--

can confirm with site whitelisted there is a lot more network requests and page load time is up by about 800%, will keep it whitelisted for now tho, as this site is a valuable resource to the community. Also (thanks to this site) I am still blocking a fair amount of ad's on here via my router, but I have deliberatly not blocked all ad providers on my router, the ones that I trust the most and deem to not be abusive I dont block on my network.

 

[stevech]

I'd pay Google some decent $ annually if they'd turn off the ads for subscribers.
Forums like this one are presumed by many to be the owner/operator's break-even avocation. But that assumption seems to be wrong.