"Oh hey you like this webpage? Let's make it take 15 minutes to load."

Flippy_D

Uggh.

Firefox 3.0
AOL (I know. My parents did not listen to me when I was 14 and now they don't want the hassle of changing)
Speedtouch ST585v6 wireless router
I can connect both wired and wirelessly, and both simultaneously I guess.

In a nutshell, I've noticed forums.penny-arcade.com is sporadically taking what one might call fucking ages to load, whilst I could go on, say, www.mice.com or some website that's uncached and that I've never been on and it'll load totally normally. Yesterday this problem also extended to Kotaku, so I'm starting to wonder if it might be affecting heavily-visited sites. Does this sound plausible? If so, what's causing it?

I tried clearing my cache and browsing history. Both sites are starred (I assume you guys know how FF3 url bar works).

Any ideas?

Zilla360

Thompson Speedtouch routers are a great brand, so it's probably AOL, crappiest ISP on the planet, that's your problem.

You could try not using AOL for DNS perhaps, and use OpenDNS instead.

meatflower

Yeah could be a DNS issue. Yesterday our internet went "down", and it took me about an hour to realize the connection was actually fine. The real problem was that TimeWarner's DNS servers were all fucked, and as soon as I put in an alternative DNS address (coincidentally those linked from OpenDNS), everything worked perfectly.

Flippy_D

Okay, how would I do that? That webpage is blank to me.

Zilla360

Just add these to your router's DNS config:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

You may need to connect to your router's telnet interface to do this.

Zilla360

Or for example using your router's browser-based config page:

(This screen will probably look different though..)

Flippy_D

Cheers.

e: seems to have worked. Awesome.

Flippy_D

It is still fuxing up. Not as badly though. I can't see anywhere in the router config to enable DNS, so I used the windows options (tcp/ip, properties, etc)

Zilla360

Hmm, well here's the manual for your router, page 8 shows you how to use the CLI (telnet), you should be able to configure DNS using that.

I don't know what to advise besides that, other than stop using AOL, because they're shit.