Starship Asterisk*

Hi,

Fairly often, when I click to read a thread, it takes a long time to display that particular page. When this happens I almost always see this bit of info in my browser's status bar: "Read s.ytimg.com"

I've checked the page code itself after it loads and can find no mention of that site in any link on the page, so I've no idea what ytimg.com is or why it is so slow when delivering whatever it is serving to the forum page.

Curiously, when I enter the URL s.ytimg.com into a browser window, I get a Google page that says...

404. That’s an error.
The requested URL / was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

Rob

rstevenson wrote:Fairly often, when I click to read a thread, it takes a long time to display that particular page. When this happens I almost always see this bit of info in my browser's status bar: "Read s.ytimg.com"

I've checked the page code itself after it loads and can find no mention of that site in any link on the page, so I've no idea what ytimg.com is or why it is so slow when delivering whatever it is serving to the forum page.

Curiously, when I enter the URL s.ytimg.com into a browser window, I get a Google page that says...

404. That’s an error.
The requested URL / was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

It's a server for static YouTube content. Unfortunately, any discussion page that has embedded YouTube content will go there (or some other ytimg.com page) to get the image you see in the video before you start it. Those YouTube servers can be heavily loaded, and sometimes the static image has to be constructed, so delays are common. The only fix is to block insertion of videos (which lots of forum admins do). Blocking embedding doesn't prevent people from providing links to YouTube, and it considerably speeds up page loads.

Thanks Chris. I hadn't realized it was the vids.

Blocking video embedding might not be a bad idea -- the Music as well as the Video threads are almost unloadable because of the many videos trying to load at once.

Rob