How to make pages load faster?

March 21, 2009 10:47 AM

What can I do about some hosts making web-page loading very slow?

Specifically, ad.doubleclick.net is killing me. Only in the last month or so, but sites like metafilter take ~1minute to load. This is Firefox on osx. Usually it says "connecting to ad.doubleclick.net...".

A simple "ping" command looks not to promising either:

computer:~/projects/datamining chris$ ping ad.doubleclick.net
PING ad.3ad.doubleclick.net (216.73.86.152): 56 data bytes
--- ad.3ad.doubleclick.net ping statistics ---
234 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

and a traceroute seems to go nowhere?

computer:~] chris% /usr/sbin/traceroute ad.doubleclick.net
traceroute to ad.3ad.doubleclick.net (216.73.86.152), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  1.352 ms  0.615 ms  0.534 ms
 2  * * *
 3  * * *
 4  * * *
 5  * * *
 6  * * *
 7  * * *

posted by H. Roark to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Well, you could edit your hosts file and alias ads.doubleclick.net to 127.0.0.1 (localhost). It should then timeout much faster.
posted by zippy at 10:53 AM on March 21

Is this a concern as a user or as the owner of the slow web site?

If as the owner of the site, I'd say find another ad host.

If as a user, if it's not important to see the ads, I'd null-route them in your hosts file.

e.g. add the line:

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net

to the hosts file. Then attempts to reach that host will fail instantly.

(location of file depends on OS and version)
posted by winston at 10:57 AM on March 21

I too have noticed this problem with Doubleclick, so you're not alone. Zippy's solution is right on track as it prevents your computer from even seeing the bad server. Make sure to reboot to enable the new changes.
posted by crapmatic at 11:06 AM on March 21

whee, thanks guys.
posted by H. Roark at 12:12 PM on March 21

If you're already using Firefox consider Adblock Plus.

I'm torn on the ethics of depriving sites of advertising revenue versus living with the substantially degraded web experience from underperforming ad networks and the annoying Flashturbation which is making a resurgence as more sites start chasing disappearing ad dollars. I've ended up using Click to Flash to disable the annoying ads but leaving Google's text ads alone as those aren't annoying and don't kill performance.
posted by adamsc at 12:52 PM on March 21 [1 favorite]

This is exactly why I started using Adblock 4~5 years ago. Forget the alleged 'ethical' issues of breaking some mythical 'social contract'; I got sick of waiting minutes for otherwise fast and lightweight pages to load.

You slow me down, I'll go around you.
posted by Pinback at 4:47 PM on March 21

Get rid of all this crab!

Use this host file for windows or Linux http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

It will avoid connecting to services like doubleclick and will also improve security (worms etc.) and privacy (tracking). This is a must do thing for every computer.

Warning: You may not be able to click on google ads directly but would have to copy & paste the link.
posted by yoyo_nyc at 7:11 PM on March 21

Just so you know, a lot of hosts out there have decided to drop all ping requests, although I don't remember why. It's not a reliable indicator of latency.
posted by qvtqht at 9:21 PM on March 21