[rlmorel]

Needless to say, I wasn’t specifically irritated with you, but with people who say posters with complaints like this are whiners and should go somewhere else. I support Free Republic with a monthly amount, so I don’t feel that is an appropriate response:

In my line of work,I have to diagnose issues exactly like this all the time with a group of very demanding customers, and there is often a critical need to ensure the systems are functioning normally since a delay can result in injury or death under the wrong circumstances, so I am used to looking for patterns like this, figuring out what is going on, and getting them fixed. It can be extremely stressful. Here is how I approach these kinds of issues, if you are interested:

BEHAVIOR
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25-50% of the time in a given session, the page loads correctly with an acceptable to no delay. However, anywhere between 50-75% of the time, loading a web page of posts from Free Republic (FR) hangs with the load bar at less than a quarter loaded, always stops in the same place. It may partially load the web page or not at all. With the passage of time, more content may load, and if one waits long enough (up to two minutes) the entire web page may eventually load. On some occasions the web page never loads. Once the progress bar stops moving, I can click the “X” in the URL field to stop the load. I can then click the refresh button, and the page then loads with little or no delay, but some percentage of the time, this does not work either.

TROUBLESHOOTING
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1.) FR is hanging on load into browser while running IE on Windows. Are other sites on the Internet doing it? No. Try FR again. Still hangs on load. Try other sites on the Internet. Okay, still good.

2.) Try different browser, such as Chrome under Windows. FR still exhibits hang. Clear Internet cache, reboot computer. FR still hangs on initial load into web page.

3.) Try different OS, MacOS under Safari on same network: FR still exhibits hang. Clear Internet cache, reboot computer. FR still hangs on initial load into web page.

4.) Try different OS, MacOS under Safari on MacOS cellular network (not wireless in work or wired in work, bypassing both) launch cellular modem, connect to Internet...FR still hangs on initial load into web page, others work fine.

5.) Try different OS, iOS, on iPad, connected to work network, work wireless, cellular bypassing both, FR still exhibits issue, other websites load fine.

6.) Try Windows, MacOS, IOS using Safari, IE, and Chrome from home ISP. FR still exhibits hang on load, other websites do not. Clear cache, reboot computer, refresh IP address, no change.

From this, I reach the following conclusions:

1.) The issue is restricted to Free Republic.

2.) It is not related to several Windows computers I have tried it on, two separate Macs, two iOS devices, an iPhone and an iPad. So hardware, network, and software have been ruled out. I judge the likely causes below, most likely IMO first, followed by decreasing likelihood:

3.) Given how I have seen these types of issues in the past dealing with web servers, there is likely a malfunctioning web server getting requests sent to it from a load balancer (or balancers) that level the load to a pool of web servers. One of those web servers in the pool is possibly malfunctioning.

4.) It is possible the load balancer (or balancers) could be malfunctioning in some way.

5.) There could be a SQL issue or other database issue.

6.) There is a possibility that some part of the Internet is malfunctioning as some Freepers have pointed out, and the to me in the Northeast, the pathway to FR is problematic in some way. I rate this as extremely low, but don’t know enough about that to rule it out...I view this as least likely given the behavior I see in the browser.

[TigersEye]

Here is how I approach these kinds of issues, if you are interested:

I'm not. That is an entirely different subject than I was addressing.

[zeugma]

Your description matches exactly what I'm seeing. Further, I ran a wireshark capture yesterday, and found lots of "Retransmission" requests. Some are labeled "Spurious Retransmission", which would seem to indicate that I'm getting retrans packets that I was not expecting. I also seem to be seeing "RST" (reset) packets that don't seem to be expected. Overall, just browsing through the wireshark packet capture, it looks like the session is fairly broken, with lots of funky network stuff going on that is interfering with the request. Unfortunately, I'm not really a network guy. I'm more of an amateur that has been exposed to network troubleshooting because of the nature of my job(s). Some of the guys I work with could take a capture like this apart and tell you exactly what is going on. I can't really.

Jim/John, I'd be surprised if we don't have some serious network geeks here on FR. I'd be happy to provide packet captures for someone to look at. As described by rimorel in the post I'm replying to, this has been really annoying behavior for quite some time now. I've just been dealing with it as funkiness and just living with it. I would imagine the retrans requests and other network weirdness is probably affecting FR performance adversely in other ways as well though, and it might make some sense to see if they can't be worked through.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I second zeugma’s response. I had noticed Once the progress bar stops moving, I can click the “X” in the URL field to stop the load. I can then click the refresh button, and the page then loads with little or no delay, but some percentage of the time, this does not work either.

. . . but didn’t get it consistently, as noted - and thought it was just my subjectivity showing. But just now that worked perfectly. Instantaneous response tho, to be complete, I must say that the first time I tried it just now the instantaneous response was not to bring up this “Your Reply:” page but to reload the page that I started from(!) Dunno if I fat-fingered, of if that is real. But I think I’ve seen that before, and it might not be just me.