Samiz Dat writes in WUWT Tips and notes
Hey, Anthony, just a heads up. I am a chemical engineering student at the University of Adelaide. Loading your page takes a few seconds wherever I am in Adelaide…..except at the University of Adelaide, when trying to access your site from any of the North Terrace campus computers I easily wait up to 10-15 minutes before the site has loaded, individual posts take another 10-15 minutes to load. Yours is the only website this has and is happening with so far.
I have had similar emails from time to time, but I’ve never had any interest in following it up since such things can often be flukes. But this time, maybe not, so I’ve decided to ask if users are seeing similar things when they try to access WUWT via government networks and university networks. I’m really interested to find out if anyone at University of Adelaide can corroborate this story.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Corroborate rather than collaborate?
Thanks, fixed.
w.
Anthony: I think word you want in the last line should be: “corroborate”
yep, that was a voice recognition error, thanks to Willis for fixing it while I was away.
Lately I’ve been having problems loading wuwt on my mobile phone. it seems to be your site, climateaudit and bishophill. All other sites that I frequent seem to load fine. The problem is only on 3gpp and not WiFi. I use Verizon. Could be many differt things.
After multiple bad experiences, I suggest you get away from Verizon ASAP:
This site loads very fast on my iPhone and Verizon is the provider.
You have been throttled. Which has a few meanings.
For some reason I’m reminded of Ben Santer.
Sounds like an internet eco-nazi einzatsgruppen is at work.
Could this be a ‘dividend’ from the COOKMOOC at University of Queensland?
Keine Nazionale Einscheissegruppen gebraucht, just too many elements on a single page.
Lots of ads, as said, pictures and videos, embedded content from here and there. Many pieces on javascript. Vulnerable to dns problems and local filters.
Tips & Notes is always slow to load for me, but my PC is from 2005. 🙂
(Reply: It’s usually slow for everyone due to the large number of comments. -mod)
2005, wow! The lower troposphere hasn’t warmed one iota in the entire life of your trusty old computer.
i think i am on my 6th computer since 2005.
I’ve certainly noticed that some of the commenters are slow.
Thoughtful deliberation is to be expected from those who think about the evidence.
+1
With all the ads, images, and other hundreds of comments, it takes a lot to load a WUWT page. It might be worth doing some timing tests with just the parent page, e.g. on Linux:
tmp$ time wget -O wuwt.html http://WattsUpWithThat.com/index.html --2015-05-06 22:51:59-- http://wattsupwiththat.com/index.html Resolving wattsupwiththat.com (wattsupwiththat.com)... 192.0.78.24, 192.0.78.25 Connecting to wattsupwiththat.com (wattsupwiththat.com)|192.0.78.24|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently Location: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/06/skeptcial-science-takes-creepy-to-a-whole-new-level/index-of-_images_user_uploaded/ [following] --2015-05-06 22:51:59-- http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/06/skeptcial-science-takes-creepy-to-a-whole-new-level/index-of-_images_user_uploaded/ Reusing existing connection to wattsupwiththat.com:80. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: unspecified [text/html] Saving to: `wuwt.html' [ ] 121,449 --.-K/s in 0.07s 2015-05-06 22:52:00 (1.66 MB/s) - `wuwt.html' saved [121449] real 0m0.949s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.004sThat’s pretty weird – the index file redirected to a 2013 posting, and not just any random posting. I can’t look into that now, maybe later. I could well have downloaded that post sometime.
At any rate – about a second for that post, including redirect.
Ric – if I type wattsupwiththat.com/index.html I also get redirected to http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/06/skeptcial-science-takes-creepy-to-a-whole-new-level/index-of-_images_user_uploaded/ – which is weird – but probably nothing to worry about.
Ditto – Awfully strange. I was able to leave a comment on the page too.
The link there points to a PDF file – https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/index-of-_images_user_uploaded.pdf
it’s probably a wordpress weirdness, the pages are most likely generated on the fly from the contents in a database, not a static file.
Being an Australian and watching the verbal machinations emanating from our universities, this would not surprise me if true.
Really, it would surprise me if it wasn’t true.
Someone (can’t recall who) posted this link here recently, saying the same thing:
http://www.infowars.com/alexa-caught-fixing-rankings-to-target-anti-obama-news-sites/
WordPress has a reputation for being slow to load.
Add on bells and whistles and it gets worse.
Pile on comments, including images, and it gets … umm … worser.
But I don’t think that would account for University of Adelaide’s glacial pace.
Maybe they have dial-up 🙂
Dial-up. That would do it. Been there.
We moved to DSL in Sept. 2008.
Most things load in a few seconds.
In-home wireless sometimes gets lost, inconvenient, but easily fixed.
Here in West Auckland, NZ, on an ordinary copper-pair phone line, I find WUWT loads at about the same speed as most sites, including local sites. UK Daily Mail is the slowest I regularly use.
Speed varies with time of day rather than the sites one accesses. 6.39.00am to 8.00am is best forgotten about, try again while locals are driving to work.
Possibly due to the large number of images.
Or maybe you computer has taste?
My iMac laptop really objects to The Independent website, possibly due the moving sidebars etc etc. Firefox almost always freezes if I’m on that page. I have to say I often object to it too… but I do like to read at least two news sites per day even though most of them make me spit tacks
Quite likely, plus factoring age of computer, internet connection & users on that connection. While away over the weekend I used a hotel’s public internet connection in their lobby to see what was new on WUWT – slower than molasses! But so was the site I needed to pay my apartment rent. Other sites like the airline check-in one popped up quick. Meanwhile, my silly AGW believers over at ClimateCrocks claim Breitbart pages open up slowly just for liberals, but my old used iMac bogs down just the same on those, but has no particular problem loading WUWT.
Here on my Toshiba laptop, WUWT is one of the fastest for loading via Chrome or Firefox… just sayin…
Some ad sites may be blocked, requiring them to timeout before the remainder of the page can be loaded.
My Ubuntu/Chrome occasionally fails to load a page (waiting for an ad server). If I press stop the page loads fine without the ads. My Win7/IE11 always works, same network. Try a different browser.
THAT is most likely the case.
You can test if they are using a proxy by closing the browser reopening it and trying again, if its suddenly much faster you know its been cached somewhere else.
Central Queensland in Australia, a city with average internet structure on an average ADSL connection, WUWT loads as fast as anywhere else. Same with the phone. Firefox with some ads blocked.
Mt Isa? I lived there for two years from 1958. No internet then!
Hmmm, maybe Mt Isa is not exactly Central Qld, since it is not far from the Three Ways in the NT.
Ha. I worked at that Three Ways Roadhouse many many moons ago after working on an outback station Cloncurry way. During time off work did some serious drinking at Mt Isa pubs.
James, are you saying there is another type of drinking besides “serious” when in the Isa?
We were stuck for three days outside of Camooweal around Christmas time 1970 (the water was six feet above the bridge), and then bogged outside of Kloncurry in 1971 on the way back from Winton (we were pulled out by a SuperHippo).
No internet then either.
If the download is slow, run a speedtest. The same test download speed but vastly different site download times (close to the speedtest result) would indicate something selective going on.
Already mentioned–blocked ads timing out.
Heavy commenting with many-pixel graphics.
“Traffic-shaping” either on you — a hostile site, or distance.
The university network has the ability to do selective rate limiting:
“The Palo Alto Networks NGFW knows which users are doing what. In the pre-Palo Alto Networks days the University could only identify activity by IP address. Now we can identify and control traffic based on user-id and groups and potentially rate limit specific application traffic. The Palo Alto Networks management interface is very easy to use. It also allows the firewall support team to react more quickly to threats.”
https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/customers/university-of-adelaide.html
Could the delay be because it takes some time for your computer to turn the pages upside down so you can read them in the SH without turning your monitor (or yourself) upside down?
We learn to read NH rubbish upside down.
I got fed up with being limited in my access to anything, so I installed Astrill. Gives me a China-proof IP address. There is a way around these kinds of things.
Not a problem at my University. I would be surprised if this was deliberate throttling. The academic staff at Universities have nothing to do with running the networks. And the IT people are simply too busy. Who has time to police the internet for political correctness.
Have you asked the IT people at Adelaide why the site is loading extremely slowly? That would be the first step. Chances are this is not deliberate.
And ask a friend with a different logon ID to try to access WUWT from a different machine at the UoA.
If you “out” yourself by admitting you visit this site and ask for help you are putting yourself at risk at ANY university. I am not being paranoid. I work in a University IT shop and I can tell you that at least one of the guys here, who is a far-left Koolaid drinkin’ nutjob, would definitely spread it around and cause problems if he knew my politics.
Good website diagnostic tool here: http://www.webpagetest.org/
The WUWT homepage is a little heavy. Graphics aren’t compressed, static data isn’t cached, and no CDN is used.
Mike, that’s all well and good, but what the hell am I looking at in the ‘results’??? There’s no scaling to tell me if the results are good or bad. People who devise websites like this always forget that 99% of us haven’t a clue what they’re talking about! I changed to a new web host provider recently, and what they instructed me to do was laughable – I couldn’t understand a single sentence. When I berated them, they replied with an apology…then did the same again. They talk to you as if you are ‘in’ the world of computers. Bizarre. I talk to my clients as though they nothing at all…which most of them don’t.
Could be climate change…
Definitely CO2.
+10
But, of course, only the Man-made kind.
(Maybe the University of Adelaide should stop getting its power from coal-fired power plants?)
I currently live in Tasmania and cannot access WUWT or Jo Nova from the computers at the local library which are under government control.
Maybe try Astrill as Mike Bromley suggests above?
Hi Pauline. I’m in the Huon Valley. I’ll try to access WUWT via the HuonLINC Library tomorrow. I’m curious to see what happen. Thanks for the heads up.
In any browser you can press F12 to get the Developers window. In there you will find some very nice graphs showing how long it takes to load each element of a website. You usually have to “turn on the functionality” before loading the page as such metrics are off by default
Thank you.
Any day I learn something new (and useful) is a day well spent.
Loads fine here. A few things to check:
– does the CDN which WP use have a point of presence in AU?
– make darn sure JavaScript that can be loaded async is being load async (stops the page render hanging up on a slow server).
– The twitter images and counters seem somewhat slow to me (based in AU)..