The Dibb bringing Firefox to a crawl

[Bozza]

Am I alone in experiencing severe slowdown of Firefox with some Dibb pages?

Firefox completely hung for me yesterday a couple of times and had to be forcibly killed off and re-started. I put it down as 'one of those things' until this morning when I've noticed, on occasion, my laptop's CPU running at 50-60% continuously. From a bit of trial and error, it seems to occur whenever The Dibb serves up a Swarovski advert to the right hand of the page. Other adverts don't seem to impact in quite the same way.

[Sean_and_Sue]

Firefox on Vista okay here.. We do have the Firefox Adblock , but don't think that makes a difference with the Dibb

[BevS97]

I was having a problem with it, until I installed the FireFox Ad Block and that did make a difference.

[BevS97]

but I will say, I've experimented today with turning off the adblocker and it's still moving quite quickly today - AND I can still see all the ads, so I am not exactly sure what difference the ad blocker does, but on that day when I was finding it sluggish, it did help.

[Bozza]

Thanks guys - I'm well aware of all that (through my job, mainly) - I've just never seen an advert be so resource intensive before.

[Stu]

Hi,
I don't have any ad blockers or popup stoppers etc as I don't trust them, however in IE, Firefox and Opera the DIBB is absolutely flying with all the adverts and site graphics showing as they should.

I know simon had a problem before christmas and it turned out to be the route his ISP was using. This will be the same reason for Bev.

[Rebelrebel]

Touch wood not had any problems with firefox on my macbook.

[Bozza]

I downloaded a Firefox adblocker and enabled it only for the doubleclick instance that serves up the Swarovski ad and my laptop was working fine again. I've just disabled it again and Firefox has become a resource hog again, running at 55% CPU as I type.

The site itself seems to be running OK and pages render quickly enough, including the advert itself (all which I'd expect as I'm in the office today and we have a pretty large pipe). But once there the page with the advert on seems to be responsible for my very hungry Firefox install.

All very bizarre - as I say - I've never noticed before anywhere else and, obviously, many sites serve doubleclick ads.

[Stu]

Darren as I said above, this will probably be the route your ISP is using to retrieve the Swarovski ad.
Most of the ads on the DIBB we host locally, so they are delivered with the same speed as the main site. However the Swarovski ad is served by a 3rd party ad server. If there is a fault with the route that your Internet Provider is using between you and the Swarovski ad server then the resources will be slower as it tries to retrieve the ad from a slow connection.

This is what happened to Bev and Simon before christmas.

When your ISP's route changes or whatever network problem exists between your ISP and the ad server has been fixed your connection speed will be back to normal.

[Northerndave]

Well it's affecting me too, causing 80-90% CPU for Firefox and slowing my PC to a crawl. I'm with Be Internet on a 16MB connection and I've had to close and re-open Firefox for the last week or so.

Slow connection through an ISP or not, this seems unusual to slow a Browser down and cause so much of an increase in CPU unless that advert is doing something 'behind the scenes'.

:confused2

[SMAX]

Its a well documented bug in Firefox. Flash is really slow in firefox and has always been. The Swarovski advert has a lot of movement in it using actionscript. This is where Firefox strugles.

http://www.postforum.com/forums/read.php?f=86&i=511&t=511

[Octal]

It must be a Windows+Firefox 'thing' this is Firefox Linux, the left of the display is with the Swarovski unblocked and the right blocked, it's only taking about 34% of the processor.

http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/3713/cpuloadffku6.png

Just to show there's now hard feelings about Firefox this is Konqueror which uses the same amount of processor, this time they are reversed the left is blocked and the right unblocked.
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/8619/cpuloadkonqv9.png

So it must be a problem with the Windows version of FF, I can notice no difference whether blocked or not.

[Northerndave]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your help on this one, and thanks to Sue who sent me a PM with a link to a prev discussion where Octal had highlighted the adblocker.

I always like the underdog (Firefox, Netscape, etc) but waiting 30 secs for Firefox to load-up and now discovering it has a 'Flash' glitch almost makes me want to go to the dark side of IE 6 :erm:

[Octal]

Netscape is to be no more soon http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=11699 :(

[Bozza]

Its a well documented bug in Firefox. Flash is really slow in firefox and has always been. The Swarovski advert has a lot of movement in it using actionscript. This is where Firefox strugles.

http://www.postforum.com/forums/read.php?f=86&i=511&t=511

So not my work's ISPs (we use several) then?

No problem thus far on my humble Macbook here at home (also running Firefox).

[georgemac]

I use a hosts file with XP which reroutes doubleclick to 127.0.0.1 and I just get an x where the advert should be, the hosts file is the best popup blocker for me
not at home just now so cannot comment on firefox speed but I've never had this problem with firefox

[Northerndave]

Netscape is to be no more soon http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=11699 :(

True, AOL is abandoning support v.soon. Apparently most of the development team went to Mosaic after AOL made 200 redundant a years after buying Netscape

Ahhh memories of the olden days, 9k Modems, Compuserve, monthly trial CD's, Big phone bills, friends complaining that my line was always engaged and Netscape :cool2:

;)

[tomnj]

I noticed the Firefox slowdown also.
Now using IE with Admuncher and very fast speeds now.