status-monitor Speed of NamePros

Hello,

Thank you for letting us now.

Our CTO @Paul has been working on trying to improve it this month. You may be able to help him pinpoint more of the causes.

Have you noticed the speed improve this month, or has it gotten worse? Improvements have been made, but perhaps they're not working as expected.

Please let us know.

Bravo Mod Team said:

Hello,

Thank you for letting us now.

Our CTO @Paul has been working on trying to improve it this month. You may be able to help him pinpoint more of the causes.

Have you noticed the speed improve this month, or has it gotten worse? Improvements have been made, but perhaps they're not working as expected.

Please let us know.

Click to expand...

Let's wait to hear from other members here to see whether this is a widespread problem that everyone is experiencing or if it's just an isolated one, but I have noticed that the website hangs for a few seconds when it gets to loading the banner ads and then it speeds up again.

IMO

Any chance you’d be able to record a video of it? All our banner ads are static—they’re just images. They shouldn’t load any differently from other images.

oldtimer said:

Let's wait to hear from other members here to see whether this is a widespread problem that everyone is experiencing or if it's just an isolated one

Click to expand...

We try not to ignore bugs just because they're isolated. As @Bravo Mod Team mentioned, I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to optimize loading times on a wider variety of mobile devices. Most of these changes haven't involved the ads, as we already require our advertisers to supply static images; we're not loading them dynamically as most third-party ad networks would.

We recently made a bunch of changes to cut down on dynamic content on most pages. This is supposed to have the opposite effect to what you're observing: pages should load faster, and content shouldn't move around the page after it loads. Nothing should be manipulated after page load without your input. However, it's possible that some of these changes haven't worked as intended, and it's important that we figure out why and find devices that we can use to test for these edge cases in the future.

oldtimer said:

Even with 5g connection things are still going to be slowed down if tracking is done past an acceptable level.

Click to expand...

I don't think it's tracking that's at play here; we use fairly minimal ad tracking, and most of it is server-side, meaning that it can't have any effect on page load times. If I had to guess, I would say it has to do with how our menubar loads. I think it's just a coincidence that the menubar and ads are both rendering at the same time.

Paul said:

We try not to ignore bugs just because they're isolated. As @Bravo Mod Team mentioned, I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to optimize loading times on a wider variety of mobile devices. Most of these changes haven't involved the ads, as we already require our advertisers to supply static images; we're not loading them dynamically as most third-party ad networks would.

We recently made a bunch of changes to cut down on dynamic content on most pages. This is supposed to have the opposite effect to what you're observing: pages should load faster, and content shouldn't move around the page after it loads. Nothing should be manipulated after page load without your input. However, it's possible that some of these changes haven't worked as intended, and it's important that we figure out why and find devices that we can use to test for these edge cases in the future.



I don't think it's tracking that's at play here; we use fairly minimal ad tracking, and most of it is server-side, meaning that it can't have any effect on page load times. If I had to guess, I would say it has to do with how our menubar loads. I think it's just a coincidence that the menubar and ads are both rendering at the same time.

Click to expand...

@Paul , thanks for checking into this, the way that this website hangs is not something that I can create on demand as it happens by random and sometimes it takes longer than other times, but I have noticed that the little line (narrow bar) that shows the progress of the website loading (rendering) stops at around 3/4 of the way to the end from a fraction of a second up to as long as two or three seconds and then it speeds up and goes to the end right after the banner ads are loaded. At the end sometimes three small fast moving rectangular shapes appear on the top right corner of the screen too for less then a second and go away after the website is done loading.

I hope this helps, but if no one else is experiencing this problem then perhaps it has something to do with my phone (I don't have the most expensive phone that is).

IMO

I generally think the site is fast, but yesterday there was a message about a handshake that was taking too long for pixel.quantserve.com. Didn't see it again, so all seems fine for me personally.

Those who are having this problem should do a speed test at speedtest.net and publish it.

dna said:

Those who are having this problem should do a speed test at speedtest.net and publish it.

Click to expand...

It's a device issue, not an internet speed issue. It's very hard to get a site with as much content as NamePros working well on an old $30 Android phone. Most users expect a variety of modern features that slows down such devices. They're simply not powerful enough to keep up, and that's especially noticeable on a site like NamePros that's optimized for power users. The physical hardware in the device is insufficient; no improvement in internet speeds will help.

We've started testing more with older phones; that's not hard to do. However, those aren't the phones at play here. The issues are with cheap carrier-locked phones. We need the phones to be unlocked in order to test with them. For a mainstream carrier, that wouldn't be too difficult, and there are even plenty of smaller carriers that would be happy to help us out. However, in my personal opinion, the carriers responsible for the problematic devices are less-than-ethical and are unlikely to release the carrier lock under reasonable terms.

Today secure.quantserve.com and rules.quantcount.com are really slow with every refresh of namePros pages.

Future Sensors said:

Today secure.quantserve.com and rules.quantcount.com are really slow with every refresh of namePros pages.

Click to expand...

Any chance you'd be able to DM me a HAR? (Please don't post it publicly, since it'll contain your session cookies.)

We're working with Cloudflare to resolve some routing issues that have impacted US East Coast users over the past two weeks, but that shouldn't have an impact on those two domains.

Paul said:

Any chance you'd be able to DM me a HAR? (Please don't post it publicly, since it'll contain your session cookies.)

We're working with Cloudflare to resolve some routing issues that have impacted US East Coast users over the past two weeks, but that shouldn't have an impact on those two domains.

Click to expand...

Hey @Paul

The good news is that namePros properties are always very fast, I have no speed problems there.

Sporadically I'm noticing delays with Quantserve and Quantcount when using namePros, but namePros pages still load pretty fine and I can interact with all content immediately without any problems.

In the footer though, I can see that the browser is still busy communicating with these trackers, and on the namePros tab there's an hourglass for ~8 seconds, until the namePros favicon finally appears (well actually, the nP favicon has disappeared, but that's another thing).

It's only slightly annoying, but today all is fine again, so I cannot reproduce this.

The last time I noticed this was on Feb 13, 2021 with pixel.quantserve.com, also reported in this thread.

Without doing any more (routing) research from me to quantserve / quantcount at this time, here's some useless info that may be useful in the future

secure.quantserve.com. 300 IN CNAME 2kpixel.quantserve.com.
2kpixel.quantserve.com. 83638 IN CNAME global.px.quantserve.com.
global.px.quantserve.com. 60 IN A 91.228.74.189
global.px.quantserve.com. 60 IN A 91.228.74.226
global.px.quantserve.com. 60 IN A 91.228.74.133
global.px.quantserve.com. 60 IN A 91.228.74.134
global.px.quantserve.com. 60 IN A 91.228.74.198

rules.quantcount.com. 83608 IN CNAME d2fashanjl7d9f.cloudfront.net.
d2fashanjl7d9f.cloudfront.net. 60 IN A 65.9.84.105
d2fashanjl7d9f.cloudfront.net. 60 IN A 65.9.84.43
d2fashanjl7d9f.cloudfront.net. 60 IN A 65.9.84.86
d2fashanjl7d9f.cloudfront.net. 60 IN A 65.9.84.125

nameproscdn.com. 159 IN A 172.67.30.86
nameproscdn.com. 159 IN A 104.22.8.33
nameproscdn.com. 159 IN A 104.22.9.33

(quantserve)
AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
27281 | 91.228.74.189 | 91.228.74.0/24 | GB | ripencc | 2011-05-25 | QUANTCAST, US

(quantcount)
AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
16509 | 65.9.84.105 | 65.9.84.0/23 | US | arin | 2018-09-18 | AMAZON-02, US

(nameproscdn)
AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
13335 | 172.67.30.86 | 172.67.16.0/20 | US | arin | 2015-02-25 | CLOUDFLARENET, US

AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
13335 | 104.22.8.33 | 104.22.0.0/20 | US | arin | 2014-03-28 | CLOUDFLARENET, US

AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
13335 | 104.22.9.33 | 104.22.0.0/20 | US | arin | 2014-03-28 | CLOUDFLARENET, US

(me)
AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
3265 | 80.127.X.X | 80.126.0.0/15 | NL | ripencc | 2001-10-11 | XS4ALL-NL Amsterdam, NL

I use Disconnect.me extension to block these trackers (this slow and unnecessary JavaScript - in other words).

oldtimer said:

Even with 5g connection things are still going to be slowed down if tracking is done past an acceptable level.

Click to expand...

Your connection speed doesn't matter at all.
Bottleneck is JavaScript, especially if weak CPU.

I am still using the same phone (the cheap $30 Android) , but I am happy to report that some of the problems that I was experiencing with the speed in the past have since gone away.

I have MS office and I do all my domaining on my phone including visiting all related websites for Registrars, Google Analytics and all the sites that I use for domain research and analysis and I haven't had any problems other than the one time that I reported it here on this thread which fortunately has not happened again since.

So for now all's good.

I believe that all sites need to do some tracking in the background in order to fine tune their system, but it can become a little annoying when it is done to the point that it starts to become noticeable to the visitors.

IMO

Future Sensors said:

It's only slightly annoying, but today all is fine again, so I cannot reproduce this.

Click to expand...

The issue we've observed recently only happens during peak regional hours, so I'm not surprised it's back to normal today. However, the resources you've mentioned are handled by CloudFront, not Cloudflare, so I can't say whether it's related.

I do know that Cloudflare has been sending a lot of US East Coast traffic to Amsterdam over the past couple weeks, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's causing congestion that affects all users in the region. (Don't ask me why; it's been practically impossible to get their support team to understand. The last person I talked to spent about an hour trying to convince me that their network moves traffic faster than the speed of light.)

oldtimer said:

I am still using the same phone (the cheap $30 Android) , but I am happy to report that some of the problems that I was experiencing with the speed in the past have since gone away.

Click to expand...

Glad to hear it! We got ahold of the same model phone that you're using and started testing with it; we tried to make some improvements based on the results. It's still not perfect, but we've got more improvements in the pipeline.

oldtimer said:

I believe that all sites need to do some tracking in the background in order to fine tune their system, but it can become a little annoying when it is done to the point that it starts to become noticeable to the visitors.

Click to expand...

None of the issues we observed when testing with your device were related to analytics. The analytics we use are a combination of server-side (meaning they don't affect your device at all) and asynchronous client-side (meaning they won't run until after your device has loaded the page). One of the biggest performance issue is actually the sheer quantity of content on many pages; there's not a whole lot we can do about that. We did notice that some display elements were using JavaScript when they probably didn't need to; we either removed those display elements or replaced them with elements that didn't need JavaScript. For example, we disabled the floating menubar that appears while scrolling down the page, as that was having a significant impact on performance. We also changed how site notices appear and removed chat from the sidebar on mobile, as low-end devices were having a hard time with those.

Future Sensors said:

In the footer though, I can see that the browser is still busy communicating with these trackers

Click to expand...

Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure this is expected to happen at times; those resources are used for analytics, so we don't bother loading them until after the page has loaded.

Future Sensors said:

and on the namePros tab there's an hourglass for ~8 seconds, until the namePros favicon finally appears (well actually, the nP favicon has disappeared, but that's another thing).

Click to expand...

This sounds like a combination of issues:

1. Non-essential resources will continue loading in the background. They should load quickly and most will usually be cached, but that depends on your browser settings to some extent. Depending on the browser that you're using, the favicon may be replaced by a loading indicator while these additional resources are loading.
2. There was a bug for a while that caused the favicon to fail to load in some browsers.
3. The favicon is currently failing to load for many people due to a Cloudflare issue. There isn't really much we can do to resolve this other than nag Cloudflare support or switch away from Cloudflare. Or wait and hope it resolves itself.

I can report that when I refresh a page on NP it happens almost instantaneously.

Considering the huge number of refreshes that are probably being done overall by everyone else I say that you guys have done a good job with improving the speed of NP.

I am also using the smart optimization feature on my phone to optimize my device which knows what things to keep and what things to delete to help speed things up.

IMO

Just when I said that NamePros loading speed was back to normal my phone Internet connection has now come to a crawl and I am beginning to suspect that maybe my phone is being jammed (perhaps by my neighbours who have been giving me a hard time in the past)

I hope they are not hitting me with microwaves, I hate people who do that.

IMO

Well, cellphones do operate in the microwave range, so if nefarious neighbors were to bombard you with microwaves, it could theoretically interfere.

That being said, it would also likely disrupt other infrastructure in the area and would become a quick ticket to a prison cell if used for an extended period of time.

If you use Wi-Fi at all, sometimes the handoff between Wi-Fi and cell can be problematic if someone is operating a microwave oven nearby (usually with the oven between your phone and the router). That’s the most common microwave interference I see in residential settings. Microwave ovens emit 2-3 orders of magnitude more energy than routers and cellphones, so they’ll quickly drown out signals that have frequency overlap. That isn’t usually an issue for 3G and 4G, though, since they’re usually operating on different frequencies.

Paul said:

Well, cellphones do operate in the microwave range, so if nefarious neighbors were to bombard you with microwaves, it could theoretically interfere.

That being said, it would also likely disrupt other infrastructure in the area and would become a quick ticket to a prison cell if used for an extended period of time.

If you use Wi-Fi at all, sometimes the handoff between Wi-Fi and cell can be problematic if someone is operating a microwave oven nearby (usually with the oven between your phone and the router). That’s the most common microwave interference I see in residential settings. Microwave ovens emit 2-3 orders of magnitude more energy than routers and cellphones, so they’ll quickly drown out signals that have frequency overlap. That isn’t usually an issue for 3G and 4G, though, since they’re usually operating on different frequencies.

Click to expand...

@Paul

Paul, I have since learned that my neighbours had created a False Tower (also known as Fake Tower) next to me that was acting as a middleman between my phone and the real Cell Tower from my provider.

So now I believe that my poor and intermittent Internet connection was more because of my neighbours than anything that you were doing at NamePros.

PS: I don't use WiFi

IMO

@oldtimer, we'd certainly like our site to work reasonably well even in suboptimal conditions. Now that we have a phone similar to yours for testing, it'll be easier for us to find a solution should you encounter issues in the future. Please don't hesitate to let us know if it happens again, regardless of what shenanigans your neighbors may be up to.

P.S. If your neighbors are legitimately interfering with your cell service, you should considering reporting it to the FCC. They're not keen on that sort of behavior.

@oldtimer Sorry to hear about the issues you've encountered

Over 95% of the time I'm on a laptop, of course runs fine. The small time I use a mobile device, again it works just fine for me