Terribly Slow Websites

[Ash]

Ever notice how out of all the sites you visit, there'll be a few that are insanely slow?
Most sites load pretty quickly.  Others take several minutes per page.

Xbox.com is awful when it comes to loading anything on it.  Don't even try going there on a slow computer as it'll actually freeze up your pc.
Another bad one is Gamespot.com.  All I want to do is go there and read a quick review or two.  Nope, that won't happen because it takes an eternity to just load the home page.

Why do some of these sites take so long while others do not?

How about you?
What sites take forever to load for you?

[Rev. Powell]

I use allmusic.com a lot to look for album covers, music samples, and reviews, but it can be frustratingly slow at times.

[Allhallowsday]

EBAY is a pain in my a$$, and slow!!!

[Menard]

Why do some of these sites take so long while others do not?

Ahem...

...first, let me point out someone's Myspace page that takes forever to load (I won't name names, Ash).

There are a lot of variables in what makes a page load slowly including the number and size of files that have to be downloaded when visiting the pages, remote server content often used for ads and often loads more slowly than the content on the primary server, the number of connections at any given time using the bandwidth (the bandwidth does not increase because there are more visitors, but is divided among the visitors up to the visitor's maximum connection speed, or up to the maximum available bandwidth according to how many connections there are to the server), and the number of server processes taking place which, regardless of bandwidth, is going to make the server respond more slowly like any home computer running multiple applications would. That's only a few possible causes, but the most likely that I can think of at the moment.

[Andrew]

Database access is another one, and that can often be a bottleneck on sites (especially anything with a large number of items/entries - like Ebay and allmusic.com).  Everything is stored in a database.  When you visit the page the server has to retrieve all that from the database.

One of the biggest ones was already mentioned: ads.  Javascript and flash ads can hold up the rest of the page loading.  All of the ads on Badmovies are displayed via iframes.  There are some cons to that, but the pro is that an ad loading slowly does not affect the rest of the page.

[Jack]

Slasherpool can take a while to load occasionally, but it's usually not bad.  Funny, you can go to 15 different pages and they load immediately, but the 16th takes a while.  And it always seems to work that way.  It's like you've reached your quota of fast loading pages and now it's your turn to get the slow one.  Arrow in the Head is another one, the discussion board used to be unusable because of its slowness, but with my new computer it's at least usably slow.

My favorite is the ones where the ads load immediately, but then you have to wait forever for the actual page to load.  IMDb used to do that with my old computer. 

And Amazon got unusable with my old computer.  With the new one it works just fine though.  I guess they don't want you to shop there unless you've got a fairly new computer.  Not exactly brilliant business strategy on their part.

[Menard]

And Amazon got unusable with my old computer.  With the new one it works just fine though.  I guess they don't want you to shop there unless you've got a fairly new computer.  Not exactly brilliant business strategy on their part.

That's become pretty standard with a lot of retailers. The message it pretty much sends is that if you don't have the money to afford a newer computer, they don't want you as a customer because you don't have the money to be worth their while.

I still shop on Amazon, but after so many pages, their site brings my browser to a crawl. eBay is the same experience.

Disney's site is pretty bad.

[dean]

Disney's site is pretty bad.

I shudder to think what you are doing on Disney's site Menard, but I'm sure it can't bode well...