indieclick, I want to help you
ogalthine
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Dear Indieclick,
Your service is terrible. I'm not sure what you do at "optimize.indieclick.com" but it sure as hell ain't optimizing. I just want to browse my internet jpegs, lovingly crafted by Messrs. Krahulik & Holkins, but your goddamn servers are eternally timing out on my requests. There should not be a 30 second wait to view an 885KB page. The fact that your company is apparently so hipster that it bleeds emo tears is just salt in my wounds at this point.
Sincerely,
Ogalthine
Curious if anyone has these problems. They're intermittent for me - but when they occur they really make browsing the PA archive very annoying. Most of the page (the pieces served on the PA servers) will load fine, but then everything will freeze while something is requested from optimize.indieclick.com. This can sometimes result in a wait of more than 30 seconds. You can refresh the page a couple times to get out of it (usually), but that's hardly an optimal web experience.
(If a dev is curious, the offending file is spc.php, served from http://optimize.indieclick.com/www/delivery/spc.php. This problem usually goes away after a while, possible because of browser cacheing. I can almost always recreate it by flushing my cache.)
Your service is terrible. I'm not sure what you do at "optimize.indieclick.com" but it sure as hell ain't optimizing. I just want to browse my internet jpegs, lovingly crafted by Messrs. Krahulik & Holkins, but your goddamn servers are eternally timing out on my requests. There should not be a 30 second wait to view an 885KB page. The fact that your company is apparently so hipster that it bleeds emo tears is just salt in my wounds at this point.
Sincerely,
Ogalthine
Curious if anyone has these problems. They're intermittent for me - but when they occur they really make browsing the PA archive very annoying. Most of the page (the pieces served on the PA servers) will load fine, but then everything will freeze while something is requested from optimize.indieclick.com. This can sometimes result in a wait of more than 30 seconds. You can refresh the page a couple times to get out of it (usually), but that's hardly an optimal web experience.
(If a dev is curious, the offending file is spc.php, served from http://optimize.indieclick.com/www/delivery/spc.php. This problem usually goes away after a while, possible because of browser cacheing. I can almost always recreate it by flushing my cache.)
ogalthine on
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Something about delayed painting.
It's a relic of the dial-up era which should be taken out back and shot.
The same reason complaining to Ramius won't make vB not suck. It takes more than one person or organization complaining when they have tens of thousands of customers. PA could complain, but that wouldn't matter as a single act.
I'm just informing PA that one of the companies they do business with is acting up. If PA does not want to do anything about it that's just fine, but I feel like they should know. I hope that's not a problem with anyone.
I'll keep you guys posted.
It shouldn't be browser caching as the http headers forbid caching (both through Cache-Control and Expires).
Tell your friends.
I guess indieclick is some sort of advertising or analytics thing. Those being slow is not an uncommon problem. There are some nifty jQuery snippets here and there to easily load those things in asynchronously WITH dependencies, so you don't have to worry about the browser loading one out of order.
I worked on an ecommerce site that had about 50 of these damn things and that did end up helping.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
The indieclick platform is a turnkey ad solution. We are using them to host our house promos at the bottom of the page.
Helping them find latency bugs is one thing, but asking them to rearchitect their frontend might be pressing my luck. Still, I appreciate the advice
Its something you can do on the penny arcade side. Basically rendering the page completely and then going back for the slower stuff, avoiding a perceivable hang for the user. But if you are actually showing ads then its a different topic. However the php file linked in the above post appears to be a javascript snippet.
But yeah, ultimately they should be diagnosing their slowness.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
The software package they are using is a customized version of OpenX (based on the file names) and it looks like that js file changes based on software updates. I have added it to a urlwatch and I'm testing the new async version on my machine. If it passes the smell test I'll push it out.
The slow file (or at least the one that's slow for me) determines which ads get displayed - it returns a javascript array containing IMG tags. If they "fix" the problem on the PA side, then it'll be great for us (page loads instantly! woo!) but bad for PA (ads won't get displayed until many seconds after the user views the page / at all). Hopefully IC can provide a long-term remedy soon...
I try to be pretty upfront with the problems we have here at PA for just this reason.
I'll try to push it out tomorrow.
Firefox 3.6.8 and XP SP3.
Safari on iPad 3.2
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
As bolded text in that exact sequence and no actual ads like I'm assuming I should be getting?
Firefox 3.6.8 on Windows Vista SP1. Have adblock but it has penny-arcade set to whitelist so it's not blocking anything on that page (or shouldn't be).
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Opera for Wii.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Getting this too, with uhh XP Professional and Firefox 3.5.3? Library needs to upgrade. This is on campus, I'll check again when I get home.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
Now to investigate!
Opera for Wii? Hoo boy. I'll see what I can do.
:v:
ff 3.6.8 and vista as well
adblock has penny arcade whitelisted
First thing I noticed was that it was it was taking a while loading google apis. I'm guessing it failed to load jquery, because my error log contains a "JQuery not defined" and several "$ not defined". Trying to load jquery directly from the google api url..well...under firefox it's just not working strangely with a timeout. What the hell.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
It still doesn't work for me under FF, sadly, but that's probably a bad data point. It basically doesn't work for anything. :?
works now!
:^:
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
It works now!
The ads are back on the main page, too. Alpha can certainly kick some code.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
You guys are the best.
I've updated the code on the Penny Arcade mainsite to reflect the recent changes. It should unblock the page when indieclick slows down. Obviously, I'll continue working with them to figure out what's going on as far as latency spikes go.
32 bit XP service pack 3 with Chrome 5.0.375.126
That's what I thought I was supposed to be getting. I figured it was a bunch of placeholders.
But yeah, that's what I was getting. Now I see the images.