Over the past day or so, I’m suddenly noticing really slow response times from Google and its related sites (including YouTube). Other websites load fine for the most part, though there are some that seem to load slower than others. I’ve tried changing my DNS servers from the default Comcast ones to both Google’s DNS (which seemed to work at first, but the problem has returned) and OpenDNS.
I’m just trying to figure out whether it’s something on our end. We did just get a new modem from Comcast last week, which has required some finagling to get working properly, as it has a router built in to it and has caused some problems with assorted things we have on our network, but we didn’t see any problems from Google at first.
So yeah, just wondering whether anyone else is seeing slow response times from Google or if it’s just us? We’re in the Seattle area (Eastside) using Comcast.
Youtube is always slow during primetime (5pm-midnight ET or so). It’s basically unusable during those periods. I haven’t noticed any problems with other google sites.
Yeah, but it’s much worse than usual, and it’s persisting during the day. I was having trouble getting YouTube videos to load this morning at 10:00 AM PDT, and Google searches are taking a really long time, and sometimes timing out (my gmail as well).
Since Telefrog is having similar problems, it may be some issue here in the Seattle area then. Hopefully it will get worked out soon.
Problems with youtube seem to come and go in my house. It’s work great right now but a week ago I had big issues with videos that refused to buffer all the way. This was on my PC and AppleTV as well. I hate technical issues that mysteriously “go away” without knowing what caused it.
One thing I think helped on my PC was disabling any add-ons when visiting youtube. For example, if you’re using Disconnect, or Ghostery, or AdBlock, try disabling them.
I do wonder if it has something to do with Comcast. When I had AT&T DSL, youtube was fine.
I live in Tacoma and since yesterday morning I’ve been having Google/Youtube issues as well, and Google DNS keeps crapping out (Firefox instantly displaying a server not found error, and then working on retry). Either that, or just taking forever to do a lookup. I occasionally have trouble with connectivity due to Comcast problems as well, so I’m not 100% that it’s a Google issue and not something else.
It’s likely nothing to do with your ISP. Youtube just doesn’t have enough bandwidth during primetime. Whenever youtube is indefinitely buffering, load up an HD video on amazon, netflix, or vimeo-- they will all work fine.
But it’s not just Youtube. I added Youtube to the list because it’s owned by Google, but all Google sites are painfully slow for me (and others, it appears), and it’s not just during primetime. (See my prior comment about not being able to load Youtube at 10:00 AM… hardly “primetime.”) I use Youtube often enough that I well aware of when it’s slow because of time of day… this is different. Something is screwing up traffic to Google’s servers, for some of us at least.
I live in Tacoma and since yesterday morning I’ve been having Google/Youtube issues as well
That’s about when we started noticing it too, Dr. Quasius.
One thing to try when it is going slow (in addition to not using Comcasts DNS) is try visiting via https or a VPN/SSH tunnel. The combination of those two things should remove the “is my ISP doing something silly with DPI” question.
If this is a home router, are there other transfers going on? Maybe a torrent you forgot about or a big patch being downloaded automatically by software (like the Blizzard background downloader?). I am wondering if the new router is misconfigured and causing an issue called “bufferbloat”.
Another possibility is that the wire into your house isn’t in great condition and this new router is having issues with it. That would be an Internet-wide problem though is if Vimeo et. al. is working fine then it wouldn’t be that.
Actually, this also reminded me of something I saw a month or two back. I just googled around to find it. Check out this video, if you can get it load ;)
Yep, same here. Actually I noticed it was better as of late yesterday afternoon. Hopefully whatever was causing the problem has been dealt with. I was getting tired of having to go to Bing to do my web searches. ;)
Whats interesting about this, is that just a few days ago Stofa (My ISP) announced that it was getting its own connection to youtube, since their youtube providers(Telia) had trouble delivering the content without issues. This means as I understand, that youtube have a dedicated backbone I guess its called, delivering its content to ISPs and that those can have issues. I just though everything ran on the same lines, so to speak but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
So, it can be a very real issue if you have buffering issues as most Stofa users here in Denmark had, with your ISP.
