TheBang

Throughout the day today, the server has been slow at various times. The connections to load new pages just wait and wait and wait, like the web server is not getting any database response, and then finally they load after 30-60 seconds.

Adam Tyner

It might be worth keeping track of when it's acting up for you. Personally, I haven't run into anything like this today, but maybe I've been accessing the site at different times than you have.

TheBang

The symptoms appear to only last for a small window of time, say, a 3-5 minute period. But it's definitely not an isolated incident, as I encountered it at least 2-3 separate times today.

As one point of reference, there was one that happened just minutes before I created this thread.

Something like a Pingdom or StatusCake monitor would show the responsiveness outage. In fact, since StatusCake is free, I'll just put a monitor on DVD Talk now, and see what it looks like. Though at the free level, the monitor resolution is only at 5 minute intervals.

VinVega

I wonder if it was Cogent related. My company uses it for ISP and it was really shitty off the desktop for me, but fine from my ATT phone. Cogent reported an outage in the Los Angeles area yesterday as 2 of our offices in that area were affected. Wonder if it was affecting traffic to IB's hosting datacenter? I'm thinking yes since this is the reported location of the website:

Geolocation Information
Continent: North America
Country: United States us flag
State/Region: California
City: Redondo Beach

fumanstan

Loading the site has been pretty slow for me this morning (and a bit yesterday too). Both from home and work.

TheBang

Noticed it again about 7 minutes ago. The condition lasted for about 2 minutes or so.

It does not appear to be network related, as the browser is connecting successfully to the HTTP server, it's just waiting for data to be returned. That's why it seems like it's probably due to a delay on the backend processing (either the script processing or the database).

Also, for this outage, i confirmed that it's not on my end, as I used 2 different browsers (so it's not browser dependent), and I also tested (remote desktop) from a browser at another location with a different internet connection (so it was not computer or connection dependent on my end). The symptoms were the same in all tested environments.

TheBang

Update: I found the issue. It's an ad element that's not loading. I captured it via the Network console on several browsers. This element is blocking the loading of the page until it times out, which takes about 1.2-1.3 minutes, according to the console.

Here are some example elements that I captured. They're all from the same ad system:

http://aax.amazon-adsystem.com/e/dtb...tml&cb=5072772

http://aax.amazon-adsystem.com/e/dtb...%2F&cb=5845112

http://aax.amazon-adsystem.com/e/dtb...%2F&cb=3260559

http://aax.amazon-adsystem.com/e/dtb...0%2F&cb=992010


This element is being called by the following included JS on each page:

http://c.amazon-adsystem.com/aax2/amzn_ads.js

When it's working normally, it usually loads in about 200 ms, according to the console, but again, yesterday and today, it has periodically not been loading and instead blocking for 1.2 minutes.

fumanstan

Good catch, I just noticed it too right now where Chrome when trying to refresh that it also sat showing in the status bar "waiting on aax.amazon-adsystem.com" message too (too lazy to inspect further though).

TheBang

In cases like this (one element blocking page loading), it may affect some browsers more than others. I only tested Chrome and Safari, and it's not surprising that it affected both similarly, since they're both WebKit-derived.

I also did some traceroutes to aax.amazon-adsystem.com, and I'm pretty confident that the timeouts are not due to any network connectivity issue on my end to that system. The 2 locations I tested from have very different paths to Amazon, one going through Internet2 direct to Seattle (apparently, Amazon has a direct I2 peer in Seattle, which is...interesting), and the other one going through Level 3 via Los Angeles to Seattle. But both of these disparate paths exhibited the exact same symptoms at exactly the same time.

VinVega

Thank you smarter than I people. I've PM'd IB about this.

IBJoel

Good news and bad news, everyone. This is not on your end OR our end! It's Amazon. So they should have it fixed within a few days.

TheBang

Thanks for the update! Good to know it's at least confirmed and being attended to. Haven't seen the issue happen today yet.

Nick Danger

I was afraid of that. A search using that address as the keyword turned up other people on other forums making the same complaint.