Increase Browsing Speed in Mozilla Firefox – Speed up Firefox

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This defiantly seem to work with the DU page loading slowness. I notice the problem was worse with threads with higher post counts. Short threads were quick, long threads, not so much. Wait times sometimes 3+ minutes.
It is not a cure-all, those pages are still slower than I think they should be, but much faster than before.
I am one of those lucky one that have Google Fiber, so network speed is not a limiting factor

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[gvstn]

1. I've been having trouble with Discus in Firefox. Anyone else?

Du is OK for me most of the time but your post count remark reminded me that I have traced my Discus problem to the same thing. Lots of comments means very slow load as you describe. But it is only Discus.

Don't mean to hijack your thread but think it is relevant and can't find others having the Discus problem using Google. It only started about 6-8 weeks ago.

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2. I don't know what Discus is, but it sounds like a common Firefox problem.

However my Linux machine does not have that problem, it is fast reguardless, so maybe it is really a Microsoft problem. Won't be the first time.

[gvstn]

3. Discus is the old Haloscan, a very common commenting system.

RawStory, TMZ and many news sites use it. The wait time for comments to load has become very annoying.

You are right that it seems to be a FF problem but I can't find any mentions of it as a recent problem with a basic search.

What is strange is I also have a portable version of Chrome. When FF won't load Discus comments after a minute or two, if I am really interested in reading the comments, I will copy/paste the link into Chrome and then Discus loads simultaneously in Chrome and FF.

***
To your problem, I remembered a post where there were alternative urls/mirrors of DU. You might test a couple of these to see if you get better load times.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4955532

[ChromeFoundry]

4. I don't think the slowness has anything to do with FireFox or Windows...

Last edited Sat Jun 27, 2015, 12:00 PM - Edit history (3)

I have noticed that every so often a requests gets stuck in a wait state on the DU side. This tells me it is their servers. From what I gather, there are four DU servers that are configured to Round-Robin (an ol technology to attempt load balancing of server resources) via DNS lookups.

Current Web Front End Servers
216.158.28.195
216.158.54.197
216.158.54.195
216.158.28.199

By enabling request diagnostics, I am able to see exactly what is going on during the lifecycle of the page request. To stabilize the results, I load the page to get all the scripts and graphic elements loaded in tot he cache. This will allow only the text/HTML content of the page to be requested for this benchmark:

Request Type : GET
URL : http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=myposts
Remote IP: 216.158.28.195:80
Request Offset: 0ms
Blocking : 0ms | 47ms
DNS Lookup : +47ms | 0ms
Connectiong: +47ms | 0ms
Sending : +47ms | 0ms
Waiting : +47ms | 14.93s
Receiving : +14.96s | 188ms
Events:
DOMContentLoaded : +15.33s
Page Load : +15.37s


A normal request looks like this:

Request Type : GET
URL : http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=myposts
Remote IP: 216.158.54.197:80
Request Offset: 0ms
Blocking : 0ms | 0ms
DNS Lookup : 0ms | 0ms
Connectiong: 0ms | 0ms
Sending : 0ms | 0ms
Waiting : 0ms | 78ms
Receiving : +78s | 140ms
Events:
DOMContentLoaded : +578ms
Page Load : +636ms


In an attempt to determine if the slow response time is isolated to a single server, I changed my hosts file to resolve "democraticunderground.com" to a single IP Address - and loaded the page several times. The following list shows the slowest load times for 20 requests made to the same URL, directed at a specific server:

Timeline to "Receiving" completed:
216.158.28.195 => +12.05s
216.158.54.197 => +10.06s
216.158.54.195 => +37.86s
216.158.28.199 => +10.20s

This shows that all of the servers offer sporadic performance issues. This tells me that the problem is not with the Apache server running a PHP script, but there is some sort of blocking occurring as the PHP script attempts to retrieve data to process the contents of the HTML response. My guess is that this site is served from a MySQL database and it is not configured to perform Non-Blocking reads (aka: dirty reads) from the database. As one user creates a post, the database table issues a Table or Page lock to perform the Insert of new data. Another user attempts to Read from that same table, but the exclusive lock placed on the container causes a Wait-Lock to occur. As hundreds of other requests are being processed for the 4 front end web servers, this Wait-Lock randomly gets pushed to the bottom of the queue.

This could be cause by intermittent network connectivity between the front end web servers and the database server, a poorly designed database, poorly designed Indexes on the data tables, or poorly designed queries being processed against the database. Regardless, this is usually pretty easy to detect and resolve. I'm fairly amazed that DU has had this issue for over a year and no effort has been made to diagnose and rectify the issue. It's not like they are not receiving enough donations - this is the primary income for at least three people.

[ChromeFoundry]

5. And as for client platform...

Similar timing are found using the following:
On Windows 7 : Chrome, Safari and IE 11
On Ubuntu : FireFox, Midori, Epiphany and Opera

This is not a Windows or FireFox issue. It is a DU Server issue that has been going on for over a year.

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6. If it is a DU server problem, then why does it not affect Linux using Firefox?

I can go to DU on the Linux machine and find the slow thread and have it up, while the Win 7 machine is still waiting. And this IS while I am waiting for the Win 7 machine to load the page.
I'm not discounting what you said, but why the difference in performance between the two OP's?
Both machine are plugged into adjacent ports on the same switch.

Edited to add: Skinner has denied there is a problem. So what you are saying, maybe that is the problem, because it is not being recognized by the Admin?

[ChromeFoundry]

7. For long threads...

with a lot of graphics. Even if they are small graphics, Linux will do a much better job at loading the content. FireFox's default max request thread count setting is designed for people that have slower internet connections. Have you tried the same post with the "View All" under Internet Explorer 11? The network stack on Linux is far more optimal than any Windows workstation will ever be. Not knocking Windows here, but it is designed to work on most hardware by people that do not want to pull back the curtain and fiddle with all the knobs and levers. Whereas, Linux is designed for people that see nothing wrong with buying a shiny new car and before getting it home, they paint it a different color and modify the engine and suspension.

The second time you load the thread (F5), the page should come up lightning fast because all the graphic content is cached locally. If it is still slow, open your developer tools (F11) and watch the Network request/response timings. One of the main requests will show a pause in the response. If it is the initial GET request for the HTML content, you are seeing the same issue I am. I ran my tests against the "My Posts" page where there would be no additional/changing graphical content. This way there was a single request and a single response.

If Skinner wants to deny that there is any network issues or database contention going on, well, I guess that is his right. There have been enough people complaining about this over the past year to warrant some investigation. If they don't want to monitor performance properly, well it's their business and their choice. I would love to hear his or ELad's explanation as to why the servers receive a request and, sometimes, pause for 30 seconds or more before the first byte of the response is delivered back to the client. The timings are dreadfully sporadic (milliseconds to minutes) and worse when there is heavy loading on the servers. The issue I am seeing occurs on Windows and Linux, and with multiple browsers. Most requests are fast to respond, but every 10th to 20th request takes for ever. It is faster to re-request the page than to wait on the original response. It cannot be a client threading issue because it is a single request. Heck, I can reproduce the issue using cURL or PowerShell - which would take the browser argument out of the equation. But if they say there isn't an issue, we will just have to accept that as their final answer.

[steve2470]

8. fyi

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1259&pid=8162

Skinner (60,418 posts)
1. I'll ask Elad to check it out. Because that is way over my head.

FWIW, We are working with our ISP to scrap our antiquated server setup and move into something new. It's a big job and it will take a while. But we are working on it!

[TreasonousBastard]

9. I've been annoyed by slow page loading, too, but...

I just added AdBlock to Firefox, cleaned out the cache, erased 5,000 history entries and restarted my Win 8.1 box-- everything started loading briskly. Just opened a 253 post thread in GD and it popped right up.

It's 3:30 AM so there's probably little traffic, but at 2:30 this box was a pig and took forever to load, so that might not be all of it.

Been using Opera since some point before God (back when it put Netscape to sleep) and that hasn't slowed as much, but has slowed some. Just ended up moving much stuff to Firefox because the latest Opera isn't that much different and the older one can't handle many new sites.

Biggest problem I have with all of them is the 300 pages of code, graphics, spyshit, clickbait, twitter clickshit, and everything else they stick you with so you can read the lousy 4 paragraph story you want to see. DU isn't nearly as bad as many of them, but there's still enough to filter out.

[blogslut]

10. I just hit the link to a thread or forum again when the load appears to lag.

Works every time for me, a Firefox user on this here DU.

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11. You're welcome.