OKay I'm getting really pixed off at the speed of the following sites:

- Any Hotmail site
- Any Yahoo site
- Windows Update

No matter what type of medium I use to access (I've tried ISDN, ADSL, Cable, T1 and good ol' 56.6kbps smoke signals) I always have to wait about 200% - 500% longer than I do for other Mainstream sites such as CNN, ABC etc.

Do any of you have similar issues and do they cause you great consternation?

Slow web sites can be annoying, however I apreciate that there are probably reasons why a site is being slow:

1. The site is popular, the server is swamped which means the information there is good, I'll happily wait for good information.

2. The site is being run at a loss, ie it's a fan site or just a person with a regular job who looks after it, he/she cannot afford to buy a dedicated server an a really fast connection.
I respect that just wait for things to load.

3. Networking problems beyond the hosts control, a routing table wrong on your own ISP can cause a site to load slow whereas the rest of the world has no problems.

There are so many reasons and although it is nice to hit a URL and find the site opening in a matter of seconds if I do hit a slow site I'll wait as long as the information at the other end is good and what I was expecting.
If however I've been waiting for five minutes for some bloody Flash introduction of website music to download which I really didn't want then I do get annoyed.

I get around 160-200KB/s to Windows Update, while I get 230KB/s from debian.org (using apt-get) and my ISP's news server (using PAN and NewsBin Pro). Your speed limitations will also vary with your OS and time of day. One thing you could consider doing is just testing downloads from your ISP during various time of the day, and see if they are the reason for the problem or not. In addition, the sites that you listed having problems with are also more interactive than the ones that you state are fine (the first 2 require a bit more 2-way conversation, while the last one has higher download demands and relies on feedback from an activex control).

Windows Update is always pretty horrible for me, pages load fine but when it comes to getting the updates down, it can take a while.

Obviously, it must be getting alot of traffic so i can understand why its sometimes slow.

I havent bothered with Hotmail since it told me that i had blocked the maximum number of ppl allowed, just too much spam mail for me

Have you guys seen the network stats for the Microsoft sites?
http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/inside.htm

I sure don't envy those admins...

LOL Yeah, I saw those stats last night... heh heh So THATS why licensing is so expensive, they have to pay a small army of admins...

That is why i set my account up so only people on my contact list can send em emails.

4. The webmaster has used tables to create the page layout, meaning that the page has to load in its entirety before the browser can render it.

4. The webmaster has used tables to create the page layout, meaning that the page has to load in its entirety before the browser can render it.

Oh I hate sites that do that!!
But I guess each Webmaster to their own

But you have to admit, with such poor support of CSS it's no wonder that webmasters still stick to tables for formatting. At least they are better than frames...

Frames....



;( :x

With regard to tables, I think the thing that's even worse than the loading issue mentioned already is the fact that a lot of web designers don't put much thought into how to set & keep the size of the tables, or they havn't done the formatting of the text right for the table cells, so that if you don't have text-size settings set to default then you end up having to scroll to the right just to read the end of sentances, etc.

I dunno so much about frames, personally I think that if they're done right. What really bugs me is the use of fixed-size fonts, [hint] even if they are the default fonts set in phpBB [/hint]