cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Slow loading with normal speed

Scribe
Grafter
Posts: 55
Thanks: 2
Registered: ‎05-02-2011

Re: Slow loading with normal speed

sorry ejs that question went straight over my head!! But I'm guessing it might mean, 'do I enter the address directly into the browser, or go via Google.' The answer is I enter it directly. However I've just tried entering both the Met office links that you gave into Opera, and there's no obvious difference in loading speed.
Another thing I've just discovered, is that if I click on refresh when Explorer(10) gets stuck and only says 'loading,' it then loads normally - and the Met Office map also animates!  So now it's only Opera that is very slow - Firefox, Chrome, Maxthon and Slimbrowser will all load and animate the map.
Perhaps it's a compatibility issue with Opera, although it used to work without any problem.
Bright
Grafter
Posts: 363
Registered: ‎02-02-2013

Re: Slow loading with normal speed

So apart from the complex weather maps on the Met Office site (which seem to load OK now in most browsers), and speedtest.net taking a long time to load its Flash programme when the page first loads up, does everything else seem to be working OK now?
BTW, ejs was referring to the DNS servers used by your computers and/or router to look up the actual IP address which corresponds to the web site address (URL) you type into the browser bar. So when you type www.metoffice.gov.uk, your computer first has to find out the IP address for that site before it can route your traffic to it. If you have configured your computers to use a specific DNS service then that will be used. If you haven't then they will most likely use the Plusnet DNS servers. Google is one company that provides DNS servers that anyone can use. And ejs pointed out that Google's servers return a different set of IP addresses.
That's because www.metoffice.gov.uk is a CNAME record pointing to www.metoffice.gov.uk.edgesuite.net, which points to a376.b.akamai.net - the Met Office is using Akamai's CDN, so you get routed to the best local Akamai CDN node.
Scribe
Grafter
Posts: 55
Thanks: 2
Registered: ‎05-02-2011

Re: Slow loading with normal speed

Hi Bright. Yes that pretty much sums it up. I've just run speedtest.net using Firefox, and it did load quite a bit faster than usual, possibly because I'm now getting 10.4Megs / 26ms ping - which is I think, something of a record!
Since the Met Office problem seems to be so browser dependent, I now think it's quite probable that they have been tinkering with their site, and Opera doesn't like what they've done! It isn't one of their 'supported' browsers, so can't complain too much I suppose!
Scribe
Grafter
Posts: 55
Thanks: 2
Registered: ‎05-02-2011

Re: Slow loading with normal speed

I emailed the Met Office, and this is an extract from their response -

'From feedback we have become aware that the website can be slow to load and are very sorry for any frustrations this is causing.  The new web pages are quite "graphics heavy" and “data rich” which we believe, in some areas of the UK, are proving slow to load. 

I hope it’s reassuring to know that our developers are working hard to do everything they can to resolve this issue to ensure a service improvement.'

So it seems that it's their site after all! It was in beta for about a year, methinks it needed a bit longer. Roll_eyes
My thanks to everyone that gave advice and help with this issue.:)