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Something was bugging me with my machine here at home... It's a 3GHz P4 running XP Pro, so not a slow one. Every now and then, IE was taking several seconds to load (up to about 5 I would estimate). Normally, it loads in the blink of an eye. After playing around for a bit, I have come to the conclusion that a combination of NTL's useless DNS and the Google Toolbar are to blame. I have a home page set in my browser, not the about:blank one that some people use. When it loads that page, or any other for that matter, the Toolbar obviously checks for the page rank etc of that page. However, it would seem that it won't let IE finish loading until it's got it's info. This means that if it can't contact the server, or, in my case, can't resolve a domain to an IP, it slows IE right down on starting, or loading a new page.
NTL are currently having intermittent problems with one of their DNS clusters. I have changed my primary DNS server to a different one which I know works, and it all seems fine now. Likewise, if I disable the Google Toolbar, or set my homepage to a blank one, IE loads instantly.
You might say that if I have poor DNS, then web pages will be slow anyway. That may be the case (sometimes - though sometimes NTL just seem to miss one DNS request, and then respond to the next one; highly irratic). However, I would rather a page sat loading for a couple of extra seconds than have IE refuse to load - I can't even quite cleanly: it comes up as "Not Responding" in the task manager.
Sorry if I rambled on a bit, just wanted to make sure I covered everything. Any light-shedding would be appreciated.
BTW, I'm running Google Toolbar version 2.0.95-big/en (GGLC)
OR if you prefer to keep them on:
- Go to OPTIONS > MORE
- Check "Fix PageRank Through Proxies" near the bottom of the list.
That should fix it.
If it doesn't, try Adaware, since something else may be acting up. Or as you said, your DNS server is fritzy anyways... if so, all bets are off
Once the toolbar left beta mode however, it ate up the IE 6.whatever and I was finding myself in slow-mo hades.
I could dump it and things would be fine, but once reloaded, things went south again.
I miss the toolbar, but I don't miss the draaaaagggggiinnnn it was causing. Perhaps I'll try it again later on, I haven't decided yet.
In terms of performance gains, I suggest a 4Mb RAMDISK (freeware by Qsoft). Point your browse cache location to that RAMDisk. The difference is amazing! :)
I don't think that the NTL DNS handling is responsible for the Tbar slowdown - although this would clearly make it worse than it is. I am not connected to the NTL DNS in any way i know of and i still experience the Tbar as slowing my pageloads.
I must admit that it has been worse, but it's still too slow. I often look at local (off-line) pages in IE and these have no PR (obviously) and should not have one either, so i get pretty annoyed when they don't load instantly.
/claus
I know the DNS client caches requests - which is consistent with what I've found (more or less). The first time I load the browser, it's slow. If I click off to a link, it's fine. If I open a new browser it's fine. It seems to be after a little while, I click a link or open a new browser window and it sits there thinking about it. I'm in agreement with sun818 - the page should load first, and the Google TB should be the last thing to run it thang; it shouldn't under any circumstances have a noticable negative impact on the browsing experience. :-(
