Serious problems using forum with firefox

I'm having serious issues with forum usability when using firefox:

1. Pages can take seconds to minutes to fully load all elements
2. Spoilers can remain empty even when the page shows as loaded
3. Skill trees often don't display after the initial load
4. Quite often the background image doesn't load at all.

Basically, trying to use the forums with firefox is painful.

Here is what I've tried so far: (all tests with clean cache)

1. Firefox Release, Beta and Nightly versions, with clean add-on free, profiles.
2. Windows 7, 8.1 and Linux.
3. Various DNS providers including my ISP, Google public, OpenDNS, and others.
4. There are no AV or other 'real-time' security applications installed. (The environments are clean)
5. There are no applications that utilise processor time or bandwidth running during testing.
6. I have also tested Chromium (42) and Internet Explorer (11). Of these, Chromium is very quick to load all elements and IE is somewhere between firefox and Chromium.

Some additional information:

I don't have issues with other sites loading in firefox, even image/media intensive sites. I've also checked loading times of numerous other sites hosted in Dallas - this appears to be where Softlayer host the PoE site (I thought Softlayer were an CDN, how about a European mirror) - and they load fine.

Traceroute:


Firefox network profile:


Chromium network profile


As can be seen from the network profiles, Chromium appears to finish loading the Index page in around 14 seconds, whereas Firefox takes 75 seconds. Interestingly, there seems to be differences in the number of requests made and the amount of data transferred.

Chromium: 77 Requests - 2.0Mb transferred - finish: 14.37 seconds
Firefox: 58 Requests - 2,903.90 KB transferred - finish: 75.28 seconds

Let me know if additional information is required.

Have you tried the stable version?

Maybe you have the same problem as lagwin1980 did. http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1207945

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ionface wrote:

Have you tried the stable version?

I have. I referred to it as the "Release" version in my original post.

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ionface wrote:

Maybe you have the same problem as lagwin1980 did. http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1207945

I don't really have that many posts, moreover, the problem manifests regardless if I'm logged in or not. It's also not just the Index page, in my case, every page, not already in cache, takes a long time to load.

As I said, this is with three different versions of firefox, each with their own clean profile, no add-ons and just one plug-in, which is flash and that's set to always ask.

I've found one issue, apparently, pathofexile.com doesn't support SPDY/HTTP2 which is now enabled by default in firefox 36 and up. Disabling this in about:config speeds things up considerably. However, I was under the impression the client and server were supposed to negotiate this connection type and fall-back if not supported...

The only problem i had was down to loading the pages when logged in, while logged out everything was fine, when logged in the skill tree and spoilers worked fine.

And as far as i could tell it wasn't down to firefox in particular, but draft coppies being saved which the forum was checking/loading when moving about the forum...support had their server admin change some things and it worked afterwards.

This actually seems more of a problem with Chrome too, I don't understand what's taking more than a few seconds. Why would they both get double-digit loading times (for twitch)?

There might be some kind of web cache proxy or malware infection. I'm guessing you know these are clean environments because you recently re-installed everything. Did you happen to install any of the ISP's software in order to "activate" or configure the modem/router?

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ionface wrote:

This actually seems more of a problem with Chrome too, I don't understand what's taking more than a few seconds. Why would they both get double-digit loading times (for twitch)?

There might be some kind of web cache proxy or malware infection. I'm guessing you know these are clean environments because you recently re-installed everything. Did you happen to install any of the ISP's software in order to "activate" or configure the modem/router?

I would have thought a caching proxy would affect all browsers equally but that clearly is not the case. Malware is also unlikely, as the problem only affects this site.

As also noted, disabling SPDY/HTTP2 in firefox speeds things up considerably, it persists on Linux (not that Linux is immune to malware, it's just less likely) and the Linux and 8.1 boxes are fresh installs. as far as ISP software, there is none.

The main issues for Firefox and IE seems to be pulling images from webcdn.pathofexile. Even Chromium is quits slow doing this.

Small section from IE network profiler:


There's nearly eight seconds here to retrieve a 400k image...

Same image in Chromium:


Again in Firefox:


I really have to wonder if this is an optimisation issue...

Is it a binary distro? Are you trying it in a VM, or dual booting?

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ionface wrote:

Is it a binary distro? Are you trying it in a VM, or dual booting?

Bare metal installs for each. Two of the boxes (7 and 8.1) run similar hardware. The Linux box is a little older but still has reasonable hardware.