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I'm using Chrome 8. Whenever I load any page from this site (from either meta or photo.se), it takes several minutes for the page to complete loading. It's not that I have a slow connection (speedtest.net currently shows 92Mbs dl, 10ms latency). The main body of the page loads quickly and looks complete but the star and vote buttons are visible but remain inactive. The "page loading" spinning icon on the page tab continues to go round and round. After a couple of minutes, the page is fully loaded and the buttons become active at last.

Just tried it in Firefox 3.6, same problem.

This is not a new issue for me, its been around since I started using photo.se (a few weeks ago)

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I often, but not always, have this problem but to a more minimal extent - 30 seconds or so. \$\endgroup\$
    – rfusca
    Commented Jan 18, 2011 at 15:15
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    \$\begingroup\$ I'm using Chrome, but I haven't seen this problem at all. \$\endgroup\$
    – Joanne C
    Commented Jan 18, 2011 at 16:54
  • \$\begingroup\$ This isn't an issue I've ever seen, and my internet connection sucks in comparison (2Mbs). For me, I can do a full reload in about 5 seconds. Do you see the same problems on any of the other websites in the StackExchange network? \$\endgroup\$
    – Rowland Shaw Mod
    Commented Jan 18, 2011 at 18:21
  • \$\begingroup\$ No problem right now, but I'm using an Imac. I was on an XP machine earlier. I'll let you know if the problem comes back. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ken
    Commented Jan 18, 2011 at 20:17

3 Answers 3

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A few first quick things to try to cover the basics when a page halts in the middle of loading for a long time:

  • Try a different browser
  • Clear the browser cache. Also less likely but if you cache is on a device that is currently inaccessible this could be the issue.
  • Restart your PC

I know these basics just sound like the standard support line -- but even the top developers at Stack Overflow go thourgh these steps.

Still Have the problem?
If a page is halting in the middle of the page the first thing I would want to know is where this happening in the page load. Web pages are pretty complicated these days, they involve dynamic Java Script and often load elements from different servers and domains (For example, our static content such as images and the javascript scripts come from sstatic.com). So to find out where the problem exaclty is we need to know what the browser is trying to load that is taking so long.

To accomplish this I would recommend the FireBug plugin for Firefox. Once you have installed this addon you can bring it up by clicking the bug icon in the lower right. Then click the Net tab. After this, you can reload the page and the timeline will hopefully show you were it is halting:

alt text

From there if you notice it is having a trouble on a certain point you might just want to report that back to us with a screen shot. If you can see that it is a different domain name that the page is halting on, it would help to go through the troubleshooting steps at How do I diagnose not being able to reach a specific website as an end user? and report those as well. (Ctrl-Shift-I) can bring up a similar tool but it is a little more detailed so I would recommend firebug.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Added an "answer" below with screen shot from firebug \$\endgroup\$
    – Ken
    Commented Jan 19, 2011 at 10:15
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Screenshot from firebug below. I think it's web proxy problem. My workplace has a web proxy which has a pretty long blacklist. Maybe you guys can let me know what I should tell my sysadmin to do...

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I agree with your interpretation -- I would just email him that screen shot. \$\endgroup\$
    – Kyle Brandt
    Commented Jan 19, 2011 at 14:04
  • \$\begingroup\$ That pattern looks like one I used to see at work... we had several proxy servers that were being round robin dispatched to, one of them would "forget" that we were authorized to reach out to the outside world from that subnet and we would get that pattern of every Nth request saying we needed to authorize. \$\endgroup\$
    – cabbey
    Commented Jan 21, 2011 at 4:17
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Are you accessing this site from your work location or any such place where you are behind a firewall or a proxy, that tracks/logs network traffic?

For instance, at my workplace, the image hosting used by the SE network (imgur.com) is blocked. So I always see the "loading" wheel for a long time and then the images are not loaded.

Could be that something similar (not blocking but moniroting) policies are slowing down your load.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Also: does it happen once every few days or always? As such the images for the up/down voting buttons should be cached. Also, can you check your cache settings, whether it is set to clear cache when the browser shuts down? \$\endgroup\$
    – Nivas
    Commented Jan 19, 2011 at 4:00

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