Waiting for google-analytics.com...

W.W. Webster · January 21, 2015

Increasingly, when I go to my site or while I am already working on my site, the display of a gallery or image will hang, often for very many minutes, with this message in the Chrome browser status bar. Alternatively, or sometimes after getting past this message, SmugMug will hang with another message "Waiting for fonts.gstatic.com...".

It is very frustrating when working on my site to frequently need to abort what I'm doing or go off and get a cup of coffee while I wait for normal services to resume. However I am particularly concerned my visitors might also suffering from these bouts of extreme performance degradation.

As for the first message, I don't have anything to do with Google Analytics, so presume SmugMug is invoking this somehow. Is that right? Can I opt out of this, and what would the implications be?

As for the second message, I presume thus has something to do with the way fonts are delivered for New SmugMug sites. Correct?

Are these messages common problems and what can be done about them, or do SmugMug and its users just have to suck it up?

W.W. Webster · January 22, 2015

Mmmm! Just me!

leftquark · January 23, 2015

Strange ... I haven't seen this and our ops team monitors page load times closely so anything that affects the broader public would pop up on our radar. Has this been happening for some time or just today (I know you did say it was increasing in frequency but if we have a better idea of the timeframe it can help debug). I'll ask the support heroes if they've seen any other instances across the help desk.

denisegoldberg · January 23, 2015

leftquark wrote: »

Strange ... I haven't seen this and our ops team monitors page load times closely so anything that affects the broader public would pop up on our radar. Has this been happening for some time or just today (I know you did say it was increasing in frequency but if we have a better idea of the timeframe it can help debug). I'll ask the support heroes if they've seen any other instances across the help desk.

I have also seen waits on entry to my site. I looked after this thread was started and didn't see any delays - but at other times the delays are noticeable. I've seen this from both work and home; I have fast network access in both locations.

The waiting for message has not been consistent with respect to the module it was waiting for.

--- Denise

W.W. Webster · January 23, 2015

My site currently will not refresh at all - I've been waiting for more than five minutes. Same "google-analytics message.

denisegoldberg · January 23, 2015

W.W. Webster wrote: »

My site currently will not refresh at all - I've been waiting for more than five minutes. Same "google-analytics message.

I know this doesn't help you - but your site is running very quickly for me right now.

I assume you're not seeing general slowdowns. Are you only seeing this problem on your site? Other smug sites? I wonder if it's worth contacting the help desk to see if they have something that might help identify the problem area.

--- Denise

W.W. Webster · January 23, 2015

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I know this doesn't help you - but your site is running very quickly for me right now. I assume you're not seeing general slowdowns. Are you only seeing this problem on your site? Other smug sites?

Thanks Denise. No, it's only my SmugMug site that's slow, although I'd be happy if it was just slow. Actually, to all intents and purposes it had stopped.

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I wonder if it's worth contacting the help desk to see if they have something that might help identify the problem area.

I have to be pretty desperate to contact the help desk these days - it's so tedious, and Aaron has also reported there are no known problems (which I appreciate).

Nine times out of ten, irrespective of my problem, after telling me to clear my browser cache, they've got nothing more to say and just want to get to the point in the script where they ask me if there's anything else they can do to help me today - having failed to be able to answer what I went there for!

W.W. Webster · January 23, 2015

BTW, I'm not saying the problem isn't with my ISP, or on the cable that runs across the Pacific. It just doesn't seem like it, and they are also reporting 'no problems'!

leftquark · January 24, 2015

When we're back in the office on Monday I'll get one (or a few) of the QA testers to do a little stress test with your site and see if we can get something to reproduce.

Things like this are really hard -- the page load is halted due to something outside of our servers and we can't recreate the problem. Denise's quick response is a good example of this: to her the page loaded super fast. When I checked your site it also loaded really fast for me. Our ops team monitors the site load times and if we see something affecting multiple users we can respond and work to resolve the issue. If they're not reporting any issues debugging a connection issue can be beyond our Heroes heads. It's beyond my expertise, for example. Things obviously simplify when we can recreate the problem.

If you see the issue happen again can you open up a terminal (or console) window and try doing:
1) ping fonts.googleapis.com
2) ping google-analytics.com

I'm getting 35-45ms response times on the google fonts and 18-36ms response times on google analytics.

That'll at least help us diagnose if it's the connection between you and google or if we should dig deeper on the connection between you and us.

W.W. Webster · January 25, 2015

leftquark wrote: »

If you see the issue happen again can you open up a terminal (or console) window and try doing:

1) ping fonts.googleapis.com
2) ping google-analytics.com

... That'll at least help us diagnose if it's the connection between you and google or if we should dig deeper on the connection between you and us.

I'm very happy to help. Can you tell me how I do this? Do I just enter each of those commands, exactly, into the terminal?

W.W. Webster · January 25, 2015

While waiting for my site to finish displaying a gallery page as the Chrome status read "waiting for fonts.gstatic.com..."

Last login: Mon Jan 26 13:10:13 on console
[121-73-33-96:~] ross% ping fonts.googleapis.com
PING googleapis.l.google.com (74.125.203.95): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 74.125.203.95: icmp_seq=0 ttl=43 time=183.322 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.203.95: icmp_seq=1 ttl=43 time=179.425 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.203.95: icmp_seq=2 ttl=43 time=182.038 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.203.95: icmp_seq=3 ttl=43 time=181.105 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.203.95: icmp_seq=4 ttl=43 time=180.079 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.203.95: icmp_seq=5 ttl=43 time=181.785 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.203.95: icmp_seq=6 ttl=43 time=180.620 ms

... etc, etc.

And after the page finally loaded, and while waiting again for a refresh of the same page to complete as the Chrome staus read "Waiting for www.google-analytics.com..."

Last login: Mon Jan 26 13:42:25 on ttys000
[121-73-33-96:~] ross% ping google-analytics.com
PING google-analytics.com (216.58.220.132): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 216.58.220.132: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=43.534 ms
64 bytes from 216.58.220.132: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=43.025 ms
64 bytes from 216.58.220.132: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=42.956 ms
64 bytes from 216.58.220.132: icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=42.464 ms
64 bytes from 216.58.220.132: icmp_seq=4 ttl=54 time=43.400 ms
64 bytes from 216.58.220.132: icmp_seq=5 ttl=54 time=44.330 ms
64 bytes from 216.58.220.132: icmp_seq=6 ttl=54 time=44.826 ms
64 bytes from 216.58.220.132: icmp_seq=7 ttl=54 time=42.787 ms
64 bytes from 216.58.220.132: icmp_seq=8 ttl=54 time=44.269 ms

... etc, etc.

It's all Greek to me, but very frustrating! All other sites including Dgrin are responding and completing immediately, BTW.

leftquark · January 26, 2015

The response times from google fonts is a bit high but not outrageous and it's not showing any packets that were dropped (lost), indicating connection problems.

If you don't mind bearing with me through the mundane questions (yes, I know, you've probably answered them a million times):
You're using Mac OS X 10.10 in both Chrome and Safari and they're both showing the issue? Do you have any extensions/plugins running? Do you have any firewall software? Are you using WiFi or an ethernet cord? Is there a router between you and your internet connection? I ask because we're going to want to mimic your setting as close as possible for any investigation. Things like these are really hard to solve when we can't recreate them and don't have other users informing us of a similar issue

leftquark · January 26, 2015

Couple more questions from the Engineering team:
1) Do you have anything like ad-block running?
2) When the issue is occurring, can you access any smugmug site or are all smugmug sites having the issue? Is it limited to just your site?
3) The status bar can sometimes "lie" about what it's actually waiting for. I see that you use Chrome. When the issue is occurring, can you right click anywhere and choose "Inspect Element" (doesn't matter where, we're going to ignore the code). You'll see a few tabs, similar to when you look for CSS edits, but instead, find the tab called "Network". It should show you which item is actually hung up. Let us know if you see anything there. Also the "Console" tab might show any errors. If there are, can you take a screenshot and pass it along?

W.W. Webster · January 26, 2015

I'll get back to you with responses to all your proper and quite reasonable questions shortly. In the meantime, I've just had the "waiting for fonts.gstatic.com..." diagnostic showing while I have a similar extended wait for a page to complete display, but from another site - StatCounter.

Perhaps StatCounter's performance is also being compromised by the same reliance on Google Fonts as is SmugMug, at least in my geography?

Waiting for google-analytics.com...

Comments