#4251 Hang when not able to connect to adserver

[A.N. Yzelman]

[Possible copy of bug 2109733.]

http://www.slashdot.org will occasionally hang waiting for connection to an adserver (in this case most of the time (but not limited to) genweb.ostg.com). Of course, this adserver behaviour may very well be location-bound; that is, US users may not experience this at all.
After a time-out (which by default is quite a long time) occurs, the rest of the page is rendered correctly and quickly.

A suggestion would be to load the main page contents first and only then (try to) connect to any external adservers.

Kind regards,
-AJ

[quixote9]

The main Slashdot page almost never loads. (Maybe two or three times in the last month.) I don't know if this is due to an ad server problem, or Slashdot's own servers are overloaded. This has been going on for *weeks*. Subpages, like "Linux" "Science" etc do load, and individual stories accessed via RSS feeds also load. I can leave a comment. But I can't submit a story. In the latter case, the status bar shows it stuck on the same "connecting to slashdot.org" where it hangs when trying to load the index page.

I run Firefox 3.1b1 on an Ubuntu 8.04 system. I run both Adblock and Noscript, cookies and javascript are explicitly allowed for slashdot.