Waiting for page to load

Site does "transfer" quickly but Waiting for takes forever, why?

[theChronic]

Hello,
I have been trying to get my site to load quicker but I am still having problems. I optimized it a lot and I think the actual page loads pretty quickly now but the browser always hangs for a few seconds on the "Waiting for www.site.com"

This hang lasts a varying period between 3 and 10 seconds and is a pain. Anyone know the source of this problem/why it happens? Web host or what? I would really like to resolve it. I am running a postnuke cms on powweb.

Thanks a ton,
John

[edited by: BlobFisk at 10:21 am (utc) on Nov. 21, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLs please! See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[BlobFisk]

Hi theChronic,

Do you have a large image or object file (flash, activeX, applet etc.) that may be causing this?

Is your page layout table based? Is it a large page?

[rocknbil]

^ ^ Yes, if there's a flash object with an incorrect path it won't error or show a red X, it will just spin it's wheels ad infinitum . . .

But I think it's something else due to your subtopic:

Site does "transfer" quickly but Waiting for takes forever, why?

If you mean what I think you mean when you say transfer, you're using ws_ftp and just uploading the files, correct? If not, these concepts may apply to other types of transfer.

I don't have a full explanation but I know cause and effect. I'm on satellite and the upload speed is often worse than dialup so sometimes I can observe web life in slow-motion. :-D

It appears there are three things that occur when you FTP using ws_ftp. It does the transfer, but then executes a PWD and LIST command. Until it's done with these two commands, the server-side system sees this file as BUSY. In fact, when uploading perl scripts, you will get a 500 error if you call the script before these two steps complete, and the error log indeed shows "text file busy or unable to stat."

For other files, such as plain text files or images, they will sometimes come up blank until the process is done.

You can disable the LIST command in ws_ftp by clicking off the "refresh file list after transfer" in options but don't know if that will help. Just wait it out, I guess.

[theChronic]

What I meant by the "Transfering" and "Waiting" was the information FireFox gives you at the bottom of the browser. It gives you the sort of status of the load.

[peco]

I think it is the amount of people connecting to the server at the same time.
I get it on mine using Firefox, IE, Netscape or whatever. When you load an address and hit return, it hangs for a few seconds then bursts into life. I experienced the exact same thing when I was on dial-up. The only difference was, when the page did start loading, it still took a long time.