I am seeing complaints about slow site loading all over the place.
Please add your complaints here.
Please identify:
device: computer vs. tablet vs. phone
browser
browser version
front page vs. individual post
time of day
IF happening in threads: is it just in threads with tons of tweets or is it happening in all threads for you?
IF happening on the front page, does it help if you click to see comments right away?
This is complaints. Arguments is a few doors over.
Baud
I see a phishing attempt when I see one. I had a perfect score on my company’s annual cybersecurity training module.
raven
I’m in the apple ecosystem and Saturday night I tried to post in a thread and kept getting “slow down you are posting to fast” messages. It didn’t matter what machine, phone or browser. I just figured Adam put the hammer on me.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I keep waiting for The Great Pumpkin and it just won’t load
Shane in SLC
I haven’t been able to read BJ on my phone for a couple of weeks. It take forever to load, crashes and reloads a few times, and then I get the “repeated problem” error message. I think it’s related to embedded tweets. It mostly seems to happen on the front page.
iPhone 8 running iOS 14.7.1
Safari (I’ve tried it with Firefox too, with the same results)
Ten Bears
I’m actually noticing slow-downs at my websites, couple others. Could be a compromised router, but I think something is going on …
WaterGirl
@raven: Actually, that’s a built-in part of WordPress so that’s not even something in the BJ website code. It’s core WordPress, and you’re the second person to report that.
Dangerman
iPhone, ios 15.3.1, safari
Front page loads slow and often crashes (I get th repeated error message); if I click through to a post, it doesn’t happen.
WaterGirl
@Dangerman: What do you mean by “click through to a post”?
Are you starting at the front page and then immediately clicking on a post?
laura
Samsung AS20- Slow load, comments may or may not appear (double posts or refresh eats the post), jump around Jump Around JUMP AROUND when refreshed. iPad is really slow to load.
No real complaints- the content is worth the tsurris.
raven
@WaterGirl: Well it didn’t really make sense because I had said diddly but you know how sensitive I am about banning.
oatler
Why does Baud always get here first? He’s gaming the system, or gleaming the cube or something.
Geeno
Argument? I’m just going to arbitrarily gainsay anything anyone says.
ATLRobert
Mobile Chrome and Firefox on current Android (Samsung S21). Several days ago I noticed quirkiness/slowness. Possibly related to Twitter. Pages loads feel slower than a week or two. Also tapping on the “refresh” to see comments causes an autoscroll which first jumps to the 1st comment and the jumps down to the site footer.
Martin
@raven: I’ve had the same problem – Safari 15.1 on an ARM MacBook Pro. Cleared up after maybe half an hour. Quitting Safari didn’t help. Didn’t try clearing cookies, but figure somewhere a token is getting set incorrectly. Haven’t seen it since. Guessing it was Sunday?
Old School
When I refresh comments in a post, it takes me down to the bottom of the screen. I’ve gotten better at remembering the last comment number before I hit refresh so I have a general idea of where I’ve last read.
Desktop, Google Chrome Version 99.0.4844.51
Been happening in every thread for a few days now.
West of the Rockies
I read and post exclusively on my Samsung Android phone. About ten days ago, it went from perfect to wonky as soon as I go to comments. If I scroll down and pause to read a comment, the screen herky-jerky scrolls towards the bottom. I scroll up to try again and it keeps lurching downwards. Eventually, after about six attempts over a minute or so, everything works normally.
Browser: Chrome
Time of day: all, think.
Please know your efforts are most appreciated!
Jinchi
My guess is that Putin doesn’t like Adam’s posts.
Bard the Grim
Newish Dell laptop running Ubuntu 20.04, Firefox 98.0. For the past week or so, I’ve noticed that posts with tweets first load to show text descriptions of the tweets, then the tweets entirely disappear until the tweet images (eventually) load. It can take of order a minute.
delk
iPad Pro 5th generation Safari 15.3.1
website loading very slowly—up/down scroll arrows not scrolling smoothly— refresh button not working consistently
I have never had any issues with the site on my 4th and 5th gen iPads
Alison Rose ???
@Old School: Same, though this seems to happen more when the post itself has embedded tweets. But yeah, when I first open the post, like from the “next post” arrow, it’s fine, but when I refresh, it starts to reload normally, then will shakily swoosh me down to the bottom of the page.
Desktop MacBook using Chrome version 97.0.4692.71
Kropacetic
Sometimes this happens to me. Or it may bring me to one particular comment, likely one I had hit “reply” to. Chrome on a desktop.
NotMax
No pokiness or stuttering as being described observed.
Win10 Pro, version 21H1*. Firefox 98.0.1.
Twitter for all intents and purposes locked down in browser settings/add-ons so all I’ve ever seen in any tweet is bare modicum of text (which often makes little sense standing alone). Which is jake with me.
*one of these years will probably have to update to 21H2 but no evident or pressing reason to rock that boat, IMHO.
ruff the dog
Yes, thanks for all you do!
problems with iphone and ipad: Front page – slow to load, “repeated problems” error message. Seems to load some text but not finish the front page, and then while loading embedded tweets and images the error happens and won’t continue loading. Happens on both Safari and Chrome browsers, but not always at the same time – can sometimes use one and not the other. Currently: neither. iPhone 8, iOS 15.3.1, social security number . . .
No problems on the iMac with Safari, though.
raven
@Martin: Yea I think so.
meander
Twitter embeds take a minute or more to load. No trouble with images.
device: Win10 computer with relatively high speed internet (500+ Mbps)
browser: Firefox, with Firefox’s “Enhanced Tracking Protection” enabled for this site, ad-blocker plus, and Privacy Badger extensions (and probably more)
browser version: 97.0.2
front page vs. individual post: Both
time of day: Morning, mid-day, evenings, nights (Pacific time)
catclub
@Old School:
That has happened to me also [Linux, firefox].
Someone noted that it seems to get better later in the day, and I agree.
SpaceUnit
FYI, I went to the argument booth and it really wasn’t anything but contradiction.
I asked for my money back.
eddie blake
page has ben crashing repeatedly on my iphone with safari. says an error has occurred or somesuch.
chrome, on laptop (lenovo thinkpad with win 11) has been having problems when comment threads are refreshed, bouncing up and down and ignoring input from pgup and pgdn keys, usually at night.
HeleninEire
Android LG4 phone. Chrome browser. It loads kinda slow but when it does I have trouble scrolling. It..jumps?? Not sure that is the word. Not smooth. No clue about the time of day but not between 7am and 4pm. I’m at work then and I don’t read BJ. ? ? ? Yes I do but I do it on my work computer. Fuck em.
Grumpy Old Railroader
Everything is just ducky
Mac PC with Monterey OS 12.2.1
Google Chrome Ver 98.0.4758.102
Twitter embeds are slow loading but always have been
Mid afternoon Pacific time
oatler
@Geeno:
No you’re not
Benw
@SpaceUnit: “I asked for my money back.”
No, you didn’t.
brendancalling
Balloon Juice has always loaded slowly on my iphone 7+, but I always figured that’s because my phone is ancient.
Baud
@brendancalling:
That’s ok. So are we!
Eunicecycle
I have an Android phone motoz3 (yes it’s old which I figured was the problem,
I use Chrome 99.04844.58
Mostly the front page posts with tweets. Sometimes they never do load. I sometimes follow the link to Twitter to read but that gets tedious.
It doesn’t help to go to the comments first.
SpaceUnit
@Benw:
Dammit!
cckids
I can’t get in at all on my phone; it hangs then says something about being redirected too many times.
iPhone 8; Chrome browser; iOS 15.3.1
And now, of course, it’s working fine. But has been happening regularly since Friday.
NotMax
@Eunicecycle
Nominee for rotating tag.
:)
dww44
My firefox browser on a getting older desktop has a hard time loading posts with lots of links, mostly the twitter ones. Now my iphone 10 does way better. Not so jerky. I’ll be honest, though, that late night post last evening from Adam, though worth it, was very jerky and slow. I was on desktop not smart phone. Firefox version is 92.0.1
thisismyonlinenym
Apple iPhone with DuckDuckGo browser. Front page reloads multiple times. But it seems to be fine if I can manage to catch it between reloads, click an a post and open it in a new window.
TaMara
@Shane in SLC: I just said this last night, that I can’t read on my phone. Brand new Moto g Stylus.
Eunicecycle
@NotMax: made me smile after a kind of crappy day :)
Kristine
device: computer vs. tablet vs. phone: iPhone 7 OS vers. 15.3
browser: iOS Safari and Chrome, latest versions
browser version: latest
front page vs. individual post: FP. I can’t get as far as individual posts because Safari stops trying to load
time of day: morning
IF happening in threads: is it just in threads with tons of tweets or is it happening in all threads for you? seems to happen mostly in tons o’ tweets threads
IF happening on the front page, does it help if you click to see comments right away? Haven’t tried this
SpaceUnit
I’m on a Mac running Safari version 15.3. Sometimes when the post is long with a lot of embeds the thread will spaz out and jump around for a while when I refresh. Eventually it leaves you at some completely random place in the comments. Kind of annoying when you’re trying to follow a really active fast-paced thread.
Adam’s nightly posts on the Ukraine situation are the best example.
WaterGirl
@SpaceUnit: Nice!
H.E.Wolf
Desktop Mac mini, running macOS Sierra, version 10.12.6. Firefox browser 97.0.1.
Almost all front-page posts with embedded material jump madly up and down the screen vertically. Comments skitter wildly up and down the screen vertically, and won’t stay put; they don’t obey page-down commands or mouse usage. If I click the cursor inside the border of a comment, I can sometimes get the skittering to stop.
All of this is new, as of a few/several days ago. I’d figured it was just the penalty for my semi-obsolete setup. :)
Thank you for troubleshooting!
Craig
PIXEL 6, Android, Chrome. Lately posts with tweets take a long time to load. Mostly the box and text shows up, the tweet loads ssssslllooowly, and then the format slides all over the place. This is on the front page.
When I click the comments button in the last week or so it loads up down around comment 8, or 10 and have to wait or it keeps sliding the formatt around.
Martin
@Eunicecycle: Decent chance it’s timing out on trying to load the tweets. They’re slow even on a really fast machine due to how Twitter does things.
RandyG
Whether on desktop or phone, front page or individual post, slowness is always related to the number of tweets.
Desktop: Windows 10 laptop, Brave (Chrome)/latest versions, relatively fast processor/SSD/wifi. The pages load relatively quickly, but any pics or videos embedded within tweets are slow to load. Doesn’t seem to affect quickly linking through to individual posts/comments.
Phone: mid-range Pixel 4a-5G, Android 11, Chrome. Never crashes, but very slow to load either whole of front page or individual posts, always due to number of tweets. Generally impossible to click through quickly to individual thread/comments because the page jumps around a lot due to individual tweets (especially those with embedded pics/videos) loading one at a time.
Time of day doesn’t seem to matter.
For a couple of weeks I had another problem — only happened with BJ and appears to no longer be a problem — but when I loaded the front page on my computer, even after the page fully loaded, the BJ tab would freeze in some ways. I could move the cursor, scroll or switch tabs, but I couldn’t click on anything for several seconds. It happened on Brave/Chrome, but didn’t check other browsers at the time. Might have been related to an extension, but I didn’t add, change or delete anything before, during or after this period…. and the problem is gone, so who knows. If it happens again, I’ll report.
E.
If a post has a lot of tweets before the jump, I cannot access the site because my 5 year old Apple Ipad crashes repeatedly and I have to restart it to get it to work again. Adam’s posts are generally unreadable to me for this reason until I get to a real computer in the morning.
Eunicecycle
@Martin: I thought it had something to do with Twitter, but I didn’t know if the change occurred here or on Twitter. I really don’t know how things ever work, considering how many different devices and browsers there are!
Jay
Sent you an e-mail , probably one of many you’ve recieved.
Front page does not fully load before “recurring error” message. I can get to some posts by jumping to “balloon juice.com “thread title”, bypassing the front page and trying to go to the direct post+comments. Then navigate from there.
Anne Laurie’s Covid posts are slow to load, sometimes get the error message, but usually they eventually load.
I blame Adam. If I am lucky, lately I can get most of the post, but there is no “after the break”, and quite often, I can’t get the full post or to the comments with out constant “auto reloads” then an error message. Ditto for your Ukraine post today, for the first 15 tries.
Iphone something, latest IOS, Safari, cleared cookies and browser history.
Eunicecycle
Aaaaand I just went to the new post and it loaded just fine, within 5 seconds. So I don’t know….
WaterGirl
@Eunicecycle: Twitter is constantly making changes that appear to make more and more “calls” to twitter in order to display tweets.
In other words, in terms of resources, it seems that Twitter is making their tweets more and more resource-intensive.
To make an analogy, some years ago the University started making it more and more of a pain in the ass to park, with the clear unstated goal of getting more people to stop driving to campus.
My totally un-researched guess is that Twitter wants people more and more to be on Twitter as their first stop, and making it less and less convenient to read their content through other means, such as reading twitter through a browser without being logged in, or reading twitter by being linked to them through other sources, such as blogs.
WaterGirl
@Eunicecycle: I did get in touch with the site developers about this issue today, so it’s possible that they have done something on their end. I’m sure I will know more soonish.
FlyingToaster
@Bard the Grim: Same exact behavior on a 1)MacBook Pro Big Sur, latest Firefox, latest Chrome; 2)MacBook Air Catalina, Firefox, Chrome 3)iPadPro 10.5″, iPadOS15, latest Chrome.
Twitter seems to be not playing nicely.
Any post with embedded tweets is misbehaving (back arrow positioning; weird painting/disappearing/repainting screen, etc.). Any post without doesn’t seem to be.
Argiope
@Bard the Grim: Same symptoms here, same version of Firefox, on a Mac computer. To be clear, this all straightens out for me in a matter of three or four seconds, so not even an annoyance, just a weird little quirk.Also happens on an iPhone 12 running iOS 15.3.1, but straightens out a bit faster
WaterGirl, bless you for playing whack-a-mole with all this stuff and for so many other things you do to keep this place happy and functional.
Lurker LXV
no complaints – just auditioning for jackal-hood
Bill Arnold
I haven’t had trouble with Adam’s long and info-rich nightly Ukraine war posts on either a (android) tablet or a couple of different laptops. Firefox, chrome, brave, all with ad and script blocker plugins/extensions, though the site is not larded up with scripts like in the past (thanks, John Cole!), so they probably don’t help much here.
Adam’s war posts do take maybe a minute to load the first time. That is acceptable for me; they are worth it.
debbie
All devices, all times of the day, all posts. Someone said something about Twitter having updated something. Maybe that’s what needs to be adjusted on the site. I tried clearing permissions, but that made no difference. This doesn’t happen on other sites.
MacBook Air, Mac iPod Mini, Acer Chromebook (Chrome on all).
ETA: I don’t get time outs, I get twitches. Lots of twitches.
Dangerman
@WaterGirl: as soon as it lets me.
WaterGirl
@Eunicecycle: It’s also the case that I edited all the current front-page posts to show only 2 tweets above the fold, so that may also have made things behave temporarily.
WaterGirl
@Lurker LXV: Looks like you made it! :-)
WaterGirl
@debbie: Yeah, but we have no control over Twitter.
My post on Monday made 71 external “calls” and about 30 or so were links that people included in the comments.
Ukraine post #19 made 1,079 external “calls”, and that has nothing to do with the website programming. Most of that is fucking twitter making lots of “calls” to their site for a single tweet.
Nothing we can do about that.
edit: Not picking on Adam here, just trying to explain the issue. Or at least part of it.
waysel
MacBook Pro, OS Catalina, Safari 15.3, Chrome and always private browsing. I’m having the spazzy jump arounds when refreshing the page as described in comment #44. It does seem worse with posts with lots of Twitter content. And the posts come up a bit slow with tweets first showing as boxed language with plain font and no graphics/photos, then converting to the standard twitter format with photos. I’ve been wishing lately for a “See Comments” button that bypasses the original post.
scribbler
@Old School: Same problem. When I refresh comments the page jumps to the bottom. Will do this multiple times (4-6) before it stops jumping and I can read comments again. And it doesn’t return to the comment I was on when I refreshed. As far as I can tell it’s happening in all threads that I read.
MacBook Air, Firefox
Another Scott
@West of the Rockies: I see the same on my Android phone. I’m convinced it’s related to Twitter’s recent changes.
The herky-jerky-twichy stuff on refreshing the page seems to be (99% of the time) associated with tweets on the page.
The can’t-post-and-when-I-do-there-are-multiple-copies issue seems to be mainly some backup or dB compaction or other job on the server that happens at 2AM ET every day (and takes 10-15 minutes).
I’ve seen the “you already said that/you’re posting too fast” kind thing maybe twice in 10 years. I assume that is another server-too-busy-at-the-moment glitch of some sort.
Thanks for all you do WG!
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
AndyG
As others have reporter, iPad (running up to date IOS and Safari) loads posts with tweets very slowly, even if there is only one tweet before the jump (e.g. Anne Laurie’s COVID updates). This slows down loading of all subsequent posts (e.g. the On the Road posts that usually precede the COVID update post in the morning)
debbie
@WaterGirl:
It was never a problem with AL’s COVID posts and they’re just as Twitter-heavy.
evodevo
Firefox Windows 10 here…post loading is problematic on the PC – a lot of tweets and links don’t load …all there is is a dotted line – the poster’s text is the only thing that shows up
BeautifulPlumage
What I experience is the browser forcing me to the bottom of the page when I refresh. If I try to stop it it jerks around, but if I let it go to the bottom once it returns to normal. This started around Friday.
device: phone browser: chrome browser version: 99.0.4844.58
front page vs. individual post: only once I go to an individual post, and only after I refresh
time of day: all times, but I usually am on the blog 5pm and later (pacific time)
IF happening in threads: is it just in threads with tons of tweets or is it happening in all threads for you? tweet heavy threads
IF happening on the front page, does it help if you click to see comments right away?
Michael Cain
Linux Mint 20.3 on a desktop machine, Cinnamon 5.2.7, Firefox 97.0.1. As others have noted, Tweets seem to expand at random, with the browser doing a complete redraw for each one. The visual effect is the page changing position every few seconds when a Tweet expands, so it’s unreadable for 20-30 seconds.
Just a personal preference, but a post with ten embedded Tweets — or a front page with a similar number of Tweets in aggregate — is largely worthless anyway.
Ruckus
Been having a loading problem for a while now.
Partial load, acts like a reload, acts like a reload, etc, etc, finally loads – or finishes loading.
One thing that may allow me to actually finish loading may be that I have reasonably fast internet, the company I use has different speeds which depend on, of course, $, so maybe my system doesn’t time out.
BJ is the only site that has these problems and I agree that it may be twitter in that tweets load first without pictures or format, they are just plain text in a box. Then the next load they look like a tweet. It takes longer with a larger post, say an Adam post, but the process is the same otherwise.
So I can load without crashing/shutting down, it just takes time and PATIENCE. I think I may be missing one of those two things.
iMac, plenty of memory, Monterey ver 12.2.1, Safari 15.3, (both latest for iMac OK just checked there is Monterey 12.3 and after I post this I’ll see if it gets better….)
grannymc
CAVEAT EMPTOR: I know just enough HTML, CSS, and JS to be dangerous, and my knowledge thereof is dated. Java and C/C++ are my bag.
But squinting through the page source, I saw that EVERY Twitter embed has this element:
<p> <script data-minify=”1” async src=”https://balloon-juice.com/wp-content/cache/min/1/widgets.js?ver=1641995232” charset=”utf-8“></script> </p>
What is this doing?, some may ask. It’s fetching an external script from the link and parsing it every time there’s a Twit to embed.
Some may also ask, “doesn’t it know it’s a duplicate?” The answer would be, no, it doesn’t. For reasons too complicated to get into here, there’s no safe and sane way for element B to know that an element A has identical content. An element can “see” another element if only if the latter is an ancestor of the first, which is not the case here.
As a result, this script is getting parsed every time the <script> tag is encountered. It is a substantial script, and parsing is slow. The actual fetch from the link is probably cached by the browser, at least on real computers. On phones, tablets, Chromebooks, etc that may have very limited memories, it might not get cached, or might not be kept in cache, which will only make things worse on devices that aren’t especially fast to begin with.
But the bigger problem is likely this repeated parsing of the same old script, over and over and over every time there’s an embedded Twit. LIke I said, parsing is a drag.
Ideally, the script should be coded just once in the <head> element. If properly coded, its internal functions should be visible to the other JS on the page.
Whether or not this can be fixed when you’re using WeirdPress, I have no idea. I know nothing about WP and am happy to remain ignorant. However, I suspect this is much of the problem, and on slower machines or older browsers that haven’t been kept up to date, it may produce memory-consumption side effects that are causing other reported symptoms.
Or, I could be talking out of my arse. It’s been a few years since I last even looked at HTML/CSS/JS.
Either way, good luck. I know you’re doing your best to try to get these issues resolved, and this stuff is NEVER easy to diagnose or fix. If it were, everyone would be a programming genius and no software would have bugs.
dougcb68
laptop with Linux Mint v. 20 OS
Brave Browser v. 1.36
Front page posts, I almost never read comments.
Happens any time of the day with posts that have multiple twitter links.
Error message reads “Taking a long time to load page. Exit? Wait?”
different-church-lady
Twitter is a virus.
(Yeah, unhelpful, but lots of others have already reported the problem with iPhones. Mine is a 13 mini with 15.1, so obviously not an obsolete device problem)
Anomalous Cowherd
iPad iOS 14.6 Safari: slow,slower. Almost unusable.
RaspberryPi 4 Raspbian with Chrome browser just updated: crashes and locks up.
Very frustrating. I like Balloon-Juice but I can’t access it anymore.
Twitter delenda est. Seriously.
alhutch
iPhone, iOS 15.3.1, Safari
Same issue as other iOS users, slow load on front page, repeated resets and then it gives up with “repeated errors” message. Seems like it happens more with posts including Twitter embeds. No issues on other sites I visit (TPM, WaPo).
pike
@Shane in SLC: Exactly what I see on an iPhone 12 Pro (my previous phone was a 6s) running iOS 15.3.1
Ruckus
I just updated on iMac to Monterey 12.3 and no real change.
I cleared all cookies and exited and restarted Safari which is now 15.4 after the above update and it is a very marked improvement over what was.
Michael Cain
@grannymc:
In addition to HTML/CSS/JS, it’s WordPress so the root cause of a lot of things is in that tangled pile of PHP: WordPress, plus themes, plus plugins, plus actual page content. One chunk of PHP in the theme does one thing; another chunk of PHP in a plugin distorts it in some fashion; and no one knows in actual practice the order in which all the PHP fragments will be executed. I have been known to say that WordPress, using PHP, has managed to recreate all of the bad software mistakes that Microsoft Windows inflicted on us in the second half of the 1990s.
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
I’m on an iPhone 8—iOS 14.8.1, and I’m using whatever version of Safari that’s with that update.
I crash on the front page. Continually. Constantly. Sometimes I can refresh a time or two & it stabilizes, but often I cannot. Once I can get the front page stabilized I can usually get to the comments, but too often I can’t get things to hold long enough to click over.
I haven’t tried to access the site on anything else.
Scout211
I have had the random slow load (I always start with the front page) a few times in the past week and also that quirk of the site seemingly refreshing or restarting on its own. IPad Pro (2018 version) using Chrome iOS 15.3.1.
I haven’t seen the problem on the Mac (Monterey MacOS 12.2.1) using chrome or iPhone 13 iOS 15.4 using chrome but I don’t read Balloon-Juice with those devices as often as do with the iPad.
Nola78
Hi. I have an iphone7 SE. Front page slow to load. Sometimes, when moving down to read, a full black page (I’m not a drummer) loads.
misswhatsis
iPhone 11 Pro Max. Tries to load site, keeps reloading, and eventually I get an error message that says ‘this site cannot be loaded because there were too many redirect messages.’
neabinorb
iPad, 15.3.1, Safari.
very slow loading front page. I see text first and typically only content that fills the screen (below that nothing) for the first minute or so of loading. Then the twitter images start appearing and disappearing. I think it’s all the twitter content that’s the problem. This morning I thought perhaps you should just move the blog to twitter since it supplies so much content. Or else the front page is so massive; it’s a long scroll, though I obviously know nothing about this.
once I’m able to get to an individual post, it loads much faster.
thanks for asking.
Ruckus
@Michael Cain:
I have been known to say that WordPress, using PHP, has managed to recreate all of the bad software mistakes that Microsoft Windows inflicted on us in the second half of the 1990s.
That’s not very nice.
Does have that faint smell of absolute truth though.
Bill Arnold
@Anomalous Cowherd:
If you have a script blocker (e.g. scriptsafe on chrome/brave) you can block scripts from platform.twitter.com. (There might be other twitter things.) Then you’ll get the twitter text blocks like the ones we ordinary users can post in the comment sections
But warning; a script blocker can be tedious when first using a site. (They tend to block everything and one enables sites serving scripts.)
Priest
Yes to new in last week or so. iPhone 8, 15.3.1. Safari and DuckDuckGo. Front page reloads, reloads and then “recurring problem” error. Yes to lots of tweets. Haven’t tried getting to individual post. Have not had any issues on home iMac or work PC. Since it started it seems like there was at least once I went to site and did not have the issue, but I don’t recall details about what was on the front page.
Aside from not being able to read the content, the biggest nuisance is that all the reloading drains the phone battery VERY quickly. Once it starts happening I have to kill the tab ASAP.
hw3
Twitter video content is slow to load on front page using Firefox 98.0.1 (64-bit) on Mac OS Big Sur 11.6.4
Kalakal
Mobile Chrome & Firefox on Android.
If I make a post, do a refresh, it jumps around like crazy, settles down after about 15 seconds at a random point in the thread, usually nearish to where I was.
Once got a “slow down, you’re posting too fast” message
mvr
I haven’t read all of the messages above. But for the past week (ish) on my HP Laptop with Windows 10 and the latest version of Firefox embedded tweets have been very slow to load especially on the front page. I get the text without the image and then as the images first start to load I lose most of the tweets only to get them back slowly now with images. Things bounce around a good bit as this happens. My house has a good fiber optic connection and I’ve got my vpn off.
It bothered me enough that I contemplated reporting it because it was not how things had been working until recently. Now that you ask I am reporting it.
And thanks for all of your work on the site!
Chbnna
This morning (about 7:15 am CT) I was unable to get Balloon Juice to load on apple iOS 15.3.1. I kept getting a “Can’t open this page” error message. I attempted to reload the page about 3 -4 times before I gave up. Seems to be working now.
tybee
I get the “bounces up and down” for several seconds when i refresh a page. and it seems to happen on pretty much every thread.
win 7
firefox 98.0.1
grannymc
A follow-up to my previous comment (#74):
While I am no fan of Twitter, I sincerely believe (with the caveat that I could be utterly full of shit) that this is not a Twitter problem. I know it looks like a Twitter problem, but that’s the symptom, not the disease. Lots of sites embed from Twitter without these problems. And I have, to the best of my ability, looked at the actual HTML and Javascript that WP is puking out, and I have located a potential problem that could explain the slow loading of Twitter embeds. (see my original comment).
Also, it looks like phone users have it worse, on the whole, than desktop and laptop users (with noted exceptions). I am going to see if can capture the web page being generated by WP for my Android and compare it to the ones I see on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. This may or may not help. I can’t do it tonight, though.
It might help if some tech-savvy nerd with an iPhone tried the same. You would have to be able to at least read and compare the HTML. You wouldn’t need to necessarily understand how it works.
It also might be helpful to know if these pages are maxing out your phone’s memory. Android and IOS both have ways, that vary among models and OS versions, to check how much memory is being used. For example, on my somewhat ancient Android LG Stylo 2, I can go to Settings->General->Memory, select a time frame, and see how much memory each app used, on average, during that time frame. I just loaded the Tuesday night Open Thread page, and I didn’t see excessive memory usage, which indicates to me that the slow-loading page is doing a lot of work but not using a lot of memory. But YMMV, depending on the type of phone and which browser and IOS you are using. So if you know how to check your memory usage, you might consider running a few tests and reporting the results here.
Finally, if you are using an adblocker, try disabling it for Balloon Juice, which currently has no ads. See if this changes the symptoms. Adblockers are sometimes overzealous in catching threats, and they may issue misleading error messages that only obfuscate the real causes. You can, of course, re-enable the adblocker after running this test.
This is almost certainly a fixable problem. With everyone’s help, I’m sure WG will be able to track it down. But please be patient. If this was easy to fix, it would have been fixed by now. Bugs like this can be very difficult to analyze and eliminate, especially when you depending on someone else’s software (in this case, WP).
Priest
Follow up, getting to individual post with comments stops the reloading, and the battery drain.
grannymc
@Priest: That is actually VERY helpful to know that it is killing your battery. Because that means the processor is working very hard on a page that doesn’t actually do a whole lot. This would support my theory that it is getting bogged down on repeated parsings of an embedded Javascript script (see comment #74) or, possibly, some other unnecessarily repetitive processing
ETA: As for why the second page doesn’t have the same effect, it’s because the browser has cached all the processing it has already done. It is just displaying the same end result.
grannymc
@Michael Cain: A poorly-coded PHP script could be at work here. I assume WP uses PHP to construct web pages. Thanks for making that point.
grannymc
@dougcb68: This is helpful to know. (See comment #74). The browser is working very hard on a relatively simple page. This indicates unnecessarily repetitive processing. As you are using a completely different OS and browser from everyone else, it also helps to confirm that this is not hardware or OS specific, and the search needs to focus on how the web page is coded.
grannymc
I think at this point, we can rule out any hardware, browser, network, or OS dependencies. Everyone — desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, different versions of different operating systems, different browsers, adblockers or not, extensions or not, VPN or not — is having a problem with front page loading when there are Twits embedded. The different platforms produce somewhat different symptoms, but that is to be expected, because their error-handling will differ, and the faster devices will have a less noticeable delay. Also, there is zero evidence of a memory leak, at least on the client side, which is helpful to know.
There might well be other bugs, and probably are, because all code of this size and complexity has bugs. Some reports may indicate other issues, but until this particular problem is fixed, I don’t think anyone can be sure about that.
ChrisG
1. Phone, Android 11, Naked Browser with Java disabled. No problems at all. Not on Twatter, don’t care if I don’t see the Twats or images.
2. PC, Windows 7 Pro, Waterfox 2022.1. Awful performance, definitely related to embedded Twats. Ridiculously slow to load.
Having said that, I only used the PC to write this comment :) Back to mobile now.
Unique uid
iPad Air 2 (2014)
Safari
Previously 15.3.x, (latest until Monday), today 15.4
Both front page and individual post
Seems less a problem of time of day, more on embedded links in the post
Details: very bad last night with Ukraine post as first one, loading the front page would respond with about a screen of data, but the post was blank for maybe 20 more screens down. I tried to wait, but it just stopped there longer than my patience. First thing today l upgraded to 15.4, had similar problems.
It got better later in the day. Seems OK, but I am also moving using the arrows for now.
Hate to stifle Adam’s creativity, but maybe he could put break after a few paragraphs and one imbed?
On Saturday (think) someone mentioned a link that didn’t open a new tab, just moved to the other site wiping out BJ. You (WG) thought it was a twitter bug. Same thing happened to me, my html experience makes me think it was a BJ/WP change – used to be the site you click on controlled that opening in a new tab versus staying in current tab.
This made we wonder if the hosting site did a word press upgrade?
Finally, the visual/text tab frequently doesn’t show up at this time (0 dark thirty). I was wondering if the hosting runs a backup process then?
Jay
Still garbage tonight on the Ukraine threads.
57 reloads, can’t read comments, on the Ukraine thread, can’t respond.
Jay
Can no longer read, read comments or post, even in “slack time”, west coast, none of the front pages. It’s just endless reloads.
nym
This site takes 5+ mins to load on a (old) PC using chrome. The more tweets, the slower. Can we just get the few bytes of text instead of the billion embeds?
Saintlywife
I’m having issues with both Firefox and Chrome. Oddly, Microsoft Edge loads right up!
Scout211
I typically read Adam’s war updates the next morning, but last night I decided to read his most recent post around 8:30 PT and was completely blocked from accessing the site. I tried to access it about 5 times and every time the site was viewable for about 3 seconds and then disappeared. The warning screen telling me something went wrong and the site was not available popped up each time, within a few seconds.
iPhone 13, iOS 15.4 using both Chrome and Safari, latest versions.