Friday 22 October 2010

Google is so slow...

I appear to be waiting too long for Google to return results .. or for the page to complete...

In the late evenings when searching for general images, all I see is a grid of grey boxes... Sometimes the page doesn't change... I have to hit Enter on the URL 1-4 times before the browser even appears to react... and after a few minutes of working with Google Maps tiles stop loading and the whole thing comes to a halt...

Switch to Bing / Yahoo / Multimap / Streetmap.co.uk and there's no problem...

Why is Google slowing down? It's not just me... I did have Chrome Dev installed.. so i removed it from my system completely and reinstalled... and I still have problems... It happens on my spare laptop... so it's not my computer... I no longer have any plugins because I clean-installed Chrome...

DNS? - On my router, I'm using Google DNS - 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Everything we do on the internet requires some DNS lookup... I just ran Ping on a few DNS servers... checking the average of 20 pings... (all 0% loss)

For 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 Google DNS
Minimum = 31ms, Maximum = 33ms, Average = 31ms
Minimum = 30ms, Maximum = 32ms, Average = 30ms

For 208.67.222.222 OpenDNS
Minimum = 23ms, Maximum = 26ms, Average = 24ms

For 212.159.13.49 and 212.159.13.50: My ISP
Minimum = 24ms, Maximum = 31ms, Average = 24ms
Minimum = 25ms, Maximum = 34ms, Average = 26ms

Google DNS promises speed and other functionality... by comparison .. I don't see it.. and I reckon by other functionality - they mean they can track where I go and what I do... and improve Analytics for websites and which AdWords are targeted at me throughout the day...

Only 4 hours ago I also ran the DNS test.. but deleted the results... the average was 70ms with minimum ~50ms and max ~180ms... This was the same for Open DNS... and I didn't test my ISP in time. I was distracted by trying to work out whether I should move myself off the antique Broadband Package I am on and onto a new one... the up-to-date candidate package looks very similar - there's a very complicated hour versus service rate limiting chart to confuse me even further...

http://portal.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/download_speeds.shtml#extraSpeeds
http://portal.plus.net/support/broadband/products/archive/bbyw/speed.shtml#Option2speeds

Looks like I'm on the better deal by a small margin...

I switched my DNS back to my ISP's name servers.... I don't think Google DNS is beneficial at all in the UK yet...  Has it helped?

Things appear faster... but it's early morning .. and one of those things with IT that it's the experience over the full 24 hours that counts... whether there's an impact at the times at which I work throughout the day... and on the work I am doing (VPN, VNC, RDP, HTTP, HTTPS, etc...)

If it makes no difference then I'm going to try switching off Web History and other tracking components... and clearing my Google History out... if we can...

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