f13.net

This problem started last week at work.  In every browser on my one work PC F13 started to load very very slowly.  Then my laptop started doing the same today.

Essentially any page on F13.net, front page or any forum section, whenever I go to open it, I get "waiting for www.google-analytics.com..." and the page hangs for 4-5 minutes.  Does anyone know what's going on?  Doesn't really happen for any other website that I know of right now.  Also, on another forum, I click the "goto first new post" in a thread and it loads the page quickly, but doesn't remember the post until it loads 4-5 minutes later.

Anyone have any ideas?  This is happening on both an old and new PC.  It's also an issue on a coworker's PC as well which is new.  Flash, Java etc. are all up to date.

Happening sporadically here, too.  I always chalk it up to buggy 'net happenings.  The tinfoil hat in me finds it odd that on top of the analytics problem my g-mail account also shit its cookies so I had to delete them all to login today.

If you're using NoScript, try blocking google analytics. I'm not sure what it is, so I blocked it reflexively a long time ago.

What is Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55591)

TLDR: It's a way of tracking people to make money.

It's an analytics service for Web sites -- it lets us see Web site usage stats and stuff like that. When Google first released it downloading that JS file was really painful at times. I had it blocked because of this exact issue. I haven't seen this problem myself for a while though which is why I think it's an Interwebs problem and not a Google problem.

There was an interwebs problem today with a few core switches, I believe.

Speaking to this our remote offices are having issues on the Verizon network. Seems the strike is really effecting service quality.

Still can't get on from work.

I miss you guys. :(

In your hosts file set www.google-analytics.com to 127.0.0.1

Can you explain this further? Is this something for all users to do?

I had some serious problems getting pages to completely load from work a couple of weeks ago, but it has seemingly healed itself.

The hostfile is a way of predefining the IP addresses of domains.  Instead of asking a DNS server to resolve the name, say f13.net, it will use the given address.

"127.0.0.1" is "localhost", i.e. the machine making the connection.  It's a way to mask undesirable pages so they get ignored.

No this is just for people who can't load pages here because their browsers are stuck trying to fetch data from Google.

This worked!  Thanks.

I've actually never seen F13 load this fast.  At least at work.

I use AdBlock now, but I used to do that trick for all kinds of sites back in the day.  You'd be surprised how much calls to external sites can slow down web page loading times.

I really wouldn't!

I add GA to all my client sites - so far I've not seen a problem or had any complaints. It's used a lot even on sites like Twitter and, provided sites are all using the same JS library, the files should get cached to your browser. Clearing your cache will be annoying as it clears cookies, browsing history etc and will slow things up while stuff is recached but it may resolve some problems with sites loading.

tl;dr - turn it off and on again.

Caching the script doesn't really make a difference when the servers it's sending the stats to are slow or unresponsive.

I've had enough sites hang on GA that it's blocked on both home and work PCs.

I'm just getting back online now after having all services down for 5 days.  :oh_i_see: