Some web pages at main site take FOREVER on IE6!

[j_hallgren]

I'm a new user as of today...but almost gave up due to how long it was taking to load some pages from site! I'm running IE6 on a W2K sys with DSL...and the http://www.videolan.org/vlc/skins.php page consistently takes about 40-45 seconds to load! (But...If I use FireFox 2, it only takes about 2 seconds!) It doesn't matter whether I've been at page before or not...so when I went to pick a skin, I had to wait almost a minute to get back to that page...

It's even MUCH worse on the http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html page! It loads in Fx2 in about 1 second, but in IE, I had to kill the task after 3-4 minutes when it still wasn't done! Not what I was expecting to find...tried it about 3 times, when I finally gave up and thus tried FireFox...thus I have those results above.

I'm current on all M$ fixes, and have no issues with any other sites like this...

BTW, the count of files/images remaining to download on both pages NEVER changes like it should, if that gives any clue.

I DO however like the product so far...it has some quirks I need to understand how to get around however, but that's not for this thread.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

IF you got any idea for how to repair, you can get the source of the website.

[Asim]

hmm

i see you guys arent using any sort of output compression?

gzip or deflate-http (zlib) should be implemented in order to compress pages on the fly, so that there's less of a strain on bandwidth...

just to give you an example:

http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php (test the videolan skins page)

pm me if you have any questions

- Asim

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Who does the decompression ? Too much CPU intensive I would say.

[Asim]

well... the decompression is on the client-side i believe... (correct me if im wrong)... and gzip level of 6 (which is the default in php, unless specified otherwise) has the best of both worlds. it's not as cpu-intensive, and look @ the bandwidth saved:

(this is copy/paste of the skins.php page analyzed on the site i linked earlier)

GZIP Compression Level Size, Compressed (bytes), Compression %
0, 43,381, 0.0
1, 5,857, 86.5
2, 5,724, 86.8
3, 5,623, 87.0
4, 5,388, 87.6
5, 5,284, 87.8
6, 5,195, 88.0
7, 5,144, 88.1
8, 5,130, 88.2
9, 5,128, 88.2


even a compression level of 3 has managed to compress the content by about 87%

for the minimal cpu load, a saving of about 36 kb per page visit is a HUGE saving on bandwidth.

just think...

say... 10,000,000 visitors / month for the skins page...

no gzip = 433,810,000 kb (approx) = 433GB of bandwidth used! (assuming 1kb = 1000b)

gzip level of 6 = 5,200,000 kb = 5.2GB used!

433 vs. 5.2? i wonder which one

- Asim

[j_hallgren]

I'm really wondering if there isn't some code on page that is reacting quite badly to IE6! As pages load very quickly in Firefox and Opera, but not in IE...maybe a patch for IE7 that broke it for others? It's happened.

When I was trying to load the Features page, I noticed that the upload and download data traffic was about identical, which seems unusual...and my wi-fi card was blinking as fast as it does when I'm downloading a video, so it's doing something...maybe over and over again???

Opera reports the Features page at 61017 bytes for main page plus 15620 for inline elements, so it should load in about a second...which it does in Opera and Fx...just NOT IE!
The skins page shows as 43381 bytes for main and 400197 for inline...still not excessive, but could be less, definitely.

[Casual]

j_hallgren,

The first thing I might suggest is to do a ping on videolan.org itself to basically confirm that you do not have a packet loss or connection problem directly with the site. (Just in case you don't know how: Start > Run... > Type 'cmd' and press Ok, then type 'ping videolan.org' and press Enter). It will output results such as below:

Pinging videolan.org [88.191.250.2] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 88.191.250.2: bytes=32 time=166ms TTL=42
Reply from 88.191.250.2: bytes=32 time=165ms TTL=42
Reply from 88.191.250.2: bytes=32 time=169ms TTL=42
Reply from 88.191.250.2: bytes=32 time=166ms TTL=42

Ping statistics for 88.191.250.2:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 165ms, Maximum = 169ms, Average = 166ms

You can also do a Continuous ping by doing 'ping -t domain.com'. I've experienced this problem with my ISP actually within the last two weeks. I had about a 30% packet loss over 300 consecutive pings, talk about slow internet! Downloads were still fast, but VPN connections and streaming media just would not work, and pages loaded slow everywhere!



Anyhow, once you've eliminated that as a possible problem, I would pick up a peice of software such as Adaware SE and Spybot Search & Destroy and verify 100% that your machine is clean of any spyware or trojans. Typically this junk malware targets Internet Explorer the first chance that it gets. I am a security junkie and even some of my home PC Internet Explorer browsers get cluttered when I let my guard down! I rarely notice though, because I use mozilla/firefox 90% of the time!


Once you've done that, if your problem still isn't solved I would visit java.sun.com and pick up the latest desktop java distribution for your version of whatever OS you are running. Sometimes an outdated version of java can cause specific problems within individual sites such as this.


Anyhow, let us know how it goes! I hop this has helped!

[MetalheadGautham]

clear case of M$ negligence. If you have IE6, ditch it and go for firefox instead. its better, and with all those addons you may never find a better browser.
Do this: like me.