Develop Bugs

Endless Page Loads

Hey guys
I've been noticing this over the last few weeks, and thought I'd throw it out there.
Whenever I visit a forum/thread on xda-developers.com, the page never loads completely. It just sits there reading data from somewhere (Not static, changes.)
Some of the sites I've seen it reading from are:
media.xda-developers.com
ping.crowdscience.com
cdn.eyewonder.com
Looks like it's something to do with ads. Not much of a problem, but thought you might like to be made aware.

The stop button on the browser isn't there for nothing
Herpderp Galaxy Ace.

Never had this problem

Try with an adblock?
Max. (From my Galaxy 2)

EmoBoiix3: This is what I'm doing. It's obviously something that is incorrect on the site though, and thought the admins would like to be advised so they can address it.
Jinsuke32: Which Browser do you use? I get it with Firefox both at home and work, so it can't be just my PC.
MacaronyMax: I have it installed but xda is on the list of exclusions. Support those who support you and what not

Can't say I have seen this either running FF on windows 7 ultimate.

There's nothing they can do about the ad content. If it takes forever to load then it takes forever to load, and that's it I'm afraid.
I recently added some social media links to a bunch of commercial websites and they all started doing the same thing. As soon as I removed the social media links the sites worked fine, so I've stopped using 3rd party stuff as much as possible.
Other than blocking the ads there's no answer to this, unless XDA removes the advertising

No ad blocking for me, running chrome, and I do not have this 'feature'/'issue'.

[Q] Is XDA a memory hog?

After a spirited browsing session here at XDA -- peaking at about 15 tabs and 50 pages -- I find that my browser will permanently increase its memory footprint by 100-300 MB. Even once I close all the XDA tabs, that memory is not freed up until I restart the browser.
I have observed this behavior for years, and always with various versions of my main browser: Opera. This site has many great features, and loads fast, but it would still be nice if this wasn't happening.
Have you guys observed the same heavy RAM usage and/or leak?
My system:
Win 7
i7 920
6 GB DDR3

Actually yes I just did with firefox. In the past I never had this problem actually but lately I only use chrome for xda because firefox always gets stuck.

Firefox is not as bad as ie. But when I load up any page from xda in ie, it is so intensive on my processor that it makes the cpu fan ramp up. Then when I scroll, it is scroll and wait for the page to actually scroll and stop before I can click on anything. It is that intensive on system resources.

well an i7 920 and 6gb of ram is a pretty beastly pc, you don't need a 8-core cpu and 16 gigs (like i have) to surf a forum

It is very normal. Because web is powerful today.
For example, Firefox use a lot of memory: 10 tabs = 250MB memory
Firefox 11 improved memory usage, but still high.
All browsers has the same issue.
Maybe it the time to upgrade your memory. Memory is very cheap today

I am NOT upgrading my pc because one website is not acting right

Obvious, but have you tried clearing cache & temp internet files? There must be a reason because I've got a 2.4 AMD (dual core) with 4GB RAM and I never have the problem. I use Chrome 100% of the time though, so can't vouch for any of the other browsers.

I'm afraid I can't help you with opera but you can try firefox with memoryfox addon. It actively frees memory blocks. Visit www browsermemory.com
One or two times I noticed the problem too but for me it wasn't such a problem to deal with it. I had a quick look on the source of the site and it looks okay, the only active contents are ajax and javascripts, rest is just text, static images & css. The hog might be one of the ajax/javascripts.

I also use Opera (still prefer Firefox though ) and according to the task manager: Memory usage = 16k (average) & Virtual memory = 151k (average) when browsing XDA alone (1 tab).

85gallon said:
I am NOT upgrading my pc because one website is not acting right
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's a mighty presumptuous statement. Regardless of if I'm browsing XDA or not, at any of the forums I frequent and if I have many tabs open eventually my Browser begins to Hog my memory, Such is the way the web is.

Do any of the people with the issue use ad-blockers? Ads are generally the culprit with things like this as the site has no (or little) control over what content they load. Also, having 50 flash files playing on separate tabs will definitely have an impact. As tigermess said, the site is mostly just text and images so it's next to nothing.
That would explain why I don't have the issue as I don't have ads turned on.

JimmyMcGee said:
That's a mighty presumptuous statement. Regardless of if I'm browsing XDA or not, at any of the forums I frequent and if I have many tabs open eventually my Browser begins to Hog my memory, Such is the way the web is.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You are the one making the presumptuous statement. I don't use tabs. I usually have one site open at a time. In the rare instance I have more than one site open, it is in a separate browser session. And that is rare. I have deleted cache and temp . I don't run an ad blocker on my pc.
I am actually running on a fresh (but updated) restore of my hard drive from factory condition. I restored last week. It was doing it before and it's still acting the same way. Both in ie and ff. The only common thread is Eset smart security. I have not disabled to test that. I am leary of doing that here with all of the trash that loads with the ads here.
But when you are browsing fine, and you browse to this web site and your computer slows to a crawl, and the only thing open is this site, then that, sir, is not presumptuous!

Archer said:
Do any of the people with the issue use ad-blockers?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't, but I also don't have Flash installed\enabled in Opera.

85gallon said:
You are the one making the presumptuous statement. I don't use tabs. I usually have one site open at a time. In the rare instance I have more than one site open, it is in a separate browser session. And that is rare. I have deleted cache and temp . I don't run an ad blocker on my pc.
I am actually running on a fresh (but updated) restore of my hard drive from factory condition. I restored last week. It was doing it before and it's still acting the same way. Both in ie and ff. The only common thread is Eset smart security. I have not disabled to test that. I am leary of doing that here with all of the trash that loads with the ads here.
But when you are browsing fine, and you browse to this web site and your computer slows to a crawl, and the only thing open is this site, then that, sir, is not presumptuous!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Fair enough.
And not to sound like a jerk, but here are your options.
1) Deal with it
B) Don't come to XDA.
In all honesty I could see that you are experiencing problems, but XDA is built on vbulletin. Which while vbulletin scales pretty good to work with XDA, its still a crappy program. Then again the sheer amount of activity on XDA precludes us from using other Forum software, and makes our site run slow on some peoples set ups.

XDA is the site that uses less memory on my PC and i don't have a super machine.. unlike is a pc of the stone age..
I use chrome with adblock plus, my pc is a celeron D 360 with 768 mb of RAM..
What & where's the problem?? I recommend you use an ad blocker and/or another browser..
Flash isn't friendly with any cpu and ram..

JimmyMcGee said:
1) Deal with it
B) Don't come to XDA.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
iii) Discuss it. Maybe someone with some insight on the back-end of XDA will chime in with advice. Maybe they don't even know some people have a problem and they will be able to make a change on their side. Poor performance and/or ad blocking aren't in anyone's best interest.
Other vbulletin forums don't gobble memory for me. I think that XDA is unlike the average vbulletin forum.

My computer is a single core hyperthreading 3.21GHz <--- (basically a wannabe duo core) with 1gb ram. I use chrome, with adblocker and my browser NEVER lags or anything, even with MANY XDA pages open...

mhhd said:
..snip.. I think that XDA is unlike the average vbulletin forum.
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Click to collapse
There in is the rub. XDA is a very large forum, we have a full time person, optimizing and maintaining our servers, as I'm sure you can imagine. SO I will hit him up and see if he says anything. But we have discussed this before, in the year or more have upgraded many of our servers to improve the speed.
So while I may have seemed like a jerk, its not because I don't care, its because we are constantly trying to improve the performance of XDA. However, with the numerous different computer setups and internet connections, not everyone is going to have a blazing fast experience, some of that it outwith our control.

Thank you. All we ask is to have your person look into it.
I will do what I can from my end. I don't think it is a vbulletin problem. That and server issues would only account for slow page loads. They wouldn't account for bringing a computer to its knees. When the page loads fully and I scroll my mouse, there is a 5-10 second lag before the page actually scrolls.
I like xda and I don't want to use ad blockers if that is the culprit as that it's how you survive and pay the bills. But there is some bad code somewhere.
I saw a few add blockers that will let you select what adds to disable. Maybe I can narrow it down some.
All we are asking is to look into and not a canned like it or leave it option.

JimmyMcGee said:
...we are constantly trying to improve the performance of XDA....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It shows. For me, the XDA experience is great in all the most important ways: speed, features, and community. I guess complaining about memory usage is a bit of a nit pick =P

XDA forums almost unusable with NoScript

Hi - My internet browser is Firefox, and I have been using NoScript for years.
There is only one website that causes me constant problems when browsing: XDA Developers.
I use NoScript constantly with a lot of stuff disabled by default: Everything Facebook is always disabled, along with doubleclick and a bunch of other tracking websites.
With NoScript on, the XDA screen is constantly jumping around, with various websites constantly trying to refresh about twice a second. It is so jumpy with embedded websites continuously refreshing, that I can't even control NoScript well enough to enable whatever disabled website(s) are causing the problem.
I wouldn't be frustrated if this happened to me all the time, but XDA is the only website I see this problem on. I would expect a high-tech developer website like XDA to have less problems instead of more problems.
Sigh. I wish somebody at XDA could fix this.
¿GJ?

NoScript has a whitelist feature. If you don't want to use it, you can't expect it to be "fixed" (actually, modified to fit your needs would be a better choice of words) anytime soon, as the forums (and many other forums, in general) rely rather heavily on scripts.
I personally have XDA added to my whitelist.
As for the refreshes, did you make sure it's not another add-on that's conflicting? Start FF in safe mode and check if the issue persists.

Don't know if this helps, but I just tested XDA with NoScript without any issues.
That being said, a lot of features rely on JavaScript, so no guarantee what would happen if you only turned on some of them.

Huh.. I use NS on FF, and have seen no issues. To be sure it is NS, have you told it to temporarily allow all, and see if that fixes it? It could certainly be another issue..

What he could be speaking of is the portal constant refreshing (not on the forum), which also occurs on my differents computers with NS (with xda on whitelist).
For me, everytime I scroll on the portal main page, it refresh itself.

It's weird - Something changed between yesterday and today. Yesterday, this page wouldn't sit still until I was able to do enough "Temporarily allow all this page" button presses (about 5 or 6) to get the page finally stabilized.
Now, everything was stable when I entered XDA with the same "allow" list I had yesterday.
I'm not a big fan of "White List"ing sites, since so many sites have Facebook embedded in them (amongst many other tracking sites I don't like). Ever since Facebook violated my privacy and sucked up my personal contact information without my explicit approval, I ... ...
... well, let's just say I won't "Like" Facebook.
I appreciate the feedback from y'all, and I wish I knew what changed.
Thanks!
¿GJ?

bitpushr said:
Don't know if this helps, but I just tested XDA with NoScript without any issues.
That being said, a lot of features rely on JavaScript, so no guarantee what would happen if you only turned on some of them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Divine_Madcat said:
Huh.. I use NS on FF, and have seen no issues. To be sure it is NS, have you told it to temporarily allow all, and see if that fixes it? It could certainly be another issue..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Some forum features won't work: dropdown menus (e.g. "Go to Page" next to the page numbers, "Quick Links", "Rate thread") search boxes not being cleared automatically when you click them, username/device completion in search boxes or using the new mention feature, share buttons (they won't show how many times X got shared), etc. The WIYIWYG editor obviously doesn't work as well.
The portal's layout is a bit messed up, too.
It's all fixed by adding xda-developers.com to the whitelist. I think you both already have it added (I removed it for testing), which is what you're supposed to do for websites you trust anyway.
---------- Post added at 12:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:53 AM ----------
¿GotJazz? said:
It's weird - Something changed between yesterday and today. Yesterday, this page wouldn't sit still until I was able to do enough "Temporarily allow all this page" button presses (about 5 or 6) to get the page finally stabilized.
Now, everything was stable when I entered XDA with the same "allow" list I had yesterday.
I'm not a big fan of "White List"ing sites, since so many sites have Facebook embedded in them (amongst many other tracking sites I don't like). Ever since Facebook violated my privacy and sucked up my personal contact information without my explicit approval, I ... ...
... well, let's just say I won't "Like" Facebook.
I appreciate the feedback from y'all, and I wish I knew what changed.
Thanks!
¿GJ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would suggest using something that will block them on all websites, then. You can probably do it using NoScript's advanced filtering options, but I personally already use AdBlock Plus, and there's a neat list you can subscribe to that will block all those buttons. Get the "Annoyance Block List" from here.

¿GotJazz? said:
It's weird - Something changed between yesterday and today. Yesterday, this page wouldn't sit still until I was able to do enough "Temporarily allow all this page" button presses (about 5 or 6) to get the page finally stabilized.
Now, everything was stable when I entered XDA with the same "allow" list I had yesterday.
I'm not a big fan of "White List"ing sites, since so many sites have Facebook embedded in them (amongst many other tracking sites I don't like). Ever since Facebook violated my privacy and sucked up my personal contact information without my explicit approval, I ... ...
... well, let's just say I won't "Like" Facebook.
I appreciate the feedback from y'all, and I wish I knew what changed.
Thanks!
¿GJ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have the opposite problem it seems, in that if I white-list the site then quite often one of the scripts goes haywire
and refreshes the page repeatedly for several refreshes or until the server complains with an error message about being overloaded.
It has been suggested to me that this may be a 2013 theme problem, so I'm trying the 2010 one for a few days to see if that fixes it.

Nameless One said:
I have the opposite problem it seems, in that if I white-list the site then quite often one of the scripts goes haywire
and refreshes the page repeatedly for several refreshes or until the server complains with an error message about being overloaded.
It has been suggested to me that this may be a 2013 theme problem, so I'm trying the 2010 one for a few days to see if that fixes it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
@Nameless One: Yes, I've been seeing the "Server Overloaded" error message as well. I wasn't sure if it was NoScript related, though I was beginning to suspect it. I would open the same XDA pages in IE or Chrome without any problem, but see the "Overloaded" error only with Firefox. Usually (but, not always), temporarily enabling all sites fixed that problem for me.
¿GJ?

I have the same constant refresh problem.
The site only works if I set noscript to allow everything globally or if I use IE (ouch).
It feels to me this site is overburdened with ad/tracking scripts and blocking them forces the site to break (admins anti block?).
I will try the 2010 theme idea and report back, also I do have the main domain whitelisted.
--edit--
2010 theme fixes it, so I guess a 2013 theme issue.

Yep - Dumped the 2013 Theme and went back to 2010 Theme.
Everything's groovy now.
¿GJ?

¿GotJazz? said:
Yep - Dumped the 2013 Theme and went back to 2010 Theme.
Everything's groovy now.
¿GJ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
2013 relies heavily on javascript so I imagine that is why you are having some issues. 2010 uses it much less but you may still see some issues relating to Javascript being blocked, such as menus not working and that sort of thing.

The ads on this site are crashing my browser

You have huge animated ads all over every page. That is a very poor way to optimize a web page. I have a low end gaming rig and it's powerful enough that I should be able to browse the web. Yet this site crashes all my browsers. Also I refuse to use adblock because it spits viruses causing popups into chrome which make me have to reinstall chrome. However when I did have it installed other than the random mouse click popups it caused the site worked fine. I know you need to make money but it's not easy to make money if you are making a slow website that causes issues when trying to navigate the site. You don't have to have gigantic poorly animated banners all over the site that are honestly rough on the eyes. Thus making me look away from the ads. Please! please! please! Optimize this site better. This is why people use ad blocking software! Thanks. =)

@s4shield, post here.

NOOK!E said:
@s4shield, post here.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was going to the only thing is that it's most of the ads on the site. Not a specific ad. Thanks

Forum acting very odd, fonts and spacing is really bad, ads overlay middle of screen

I'm having some really bad issues which are making the forums not usable. I haven't really changed anything so am not sure what the issue is.
1) The fonts and spacing is very odd, with sometimes larger or smaller font than expected and sometimes it's all scrunched in on one side.
2) Ads will often overlay on top of the forums, the sidebar on the right will sometimes be right in the middle of the forum page blocking my view, I don't see any way to move it.
3) Very jerky scrolling, sometimes scrolling jumps an entire page, other times it is just kind of ratchety, I turn my mouse wheel and it seems like every scroll takes a half second to catch up. My mouse is set to scroll 3 lines, but I've tried it with 1 line and it's the same. It's the same with smooth scrolling turned on or off.
4) The forums in general are very very slow, I mean unusable slow. A forum page may take upwards of 10 seconds to load, it seems like the ads are what's slowing it down because I can see the page stall, then the ad loads and everything works.
5) Most of the elements on the forum webpage seem to overlap each other, and many elements don't show up, or don't show a graphic but you can still mouse hover and see it's there.
I'm using Internet Explorer 11 on windows 10 on a surface pro 3 (i5/8gm RAM). Any help or suggestions for streamlining would be appreciated. Included a screen shot of the odd fonts and spacing. Zooming, or CTRL+ +/- doesn't help.

spinedoc said:
I'm having some really bad issues which are making the forums not usable. I haven't really changed anything so am not sure what the issue is.
1) The fonts and spacing is very odd, with sometimes larger or smaller font than expected and sometimes it's all scrunched in on one side.
2) Ads will often overlay on top of the forums, the sidebar on the right will sometimes be right in the middle of the forum page blocking my view, I don't see any way to move it.
3) Very jerky scrolling, sometimes scrolling jumps an entire page, other times it is just kind of ratchety, I turn my mouse wheel and it seems like every scroll takes a half second to catch up. My mouse is set to scroll 3 lines, but I've tried it with 1 line and it's the same. It's the same with smooth scrolling turned on or off.
4) The forums in general are very very slow, I mean unusable slow. A forum page may take upwards of 10 seconds to load, it seems like the ads are what's slowing it down because I can see the page stall, then the ad loads and everything works.
5) Most of the elements on the forum webpage seem to overlap each other, and many elements don't show up, or don't show a graphic but you can still mouse hover and see it's there.
I'm using Internet Explorer 11 on windows 10 on a surface pro 3 (i5/8gm RAM). Any help or suggestions for streamlining would be appreciated. Included a screen shot of the odd fonts and spacing. Zooming, or CTRL+ +/- doesn't help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First let me say that I'm moving this thread to About xda-developers since that's where site issues and discussion belong.
About your issue specifically: I haven't seen anyone making this complaint, but I do have a suggestion. Internet Explorer is terrible at rendering websites. The worst bar none. Since you are on Windows 10, I'd switch to the Edge browser (even Microsoft wants you to). Or you could switch to Firefox (my personal favorite), Chrome, or any other derivative of those. Microsoft only included IE in Windows 10 for backward compatibility and so I'd quit using it. I even got my 70 year old father in law to give up his beloved Internet Explorer. If he can do it, you can too! :highfive:

Thanks, hopefully someone here can offer a solution. I'm kind of stuck on IE11 until Edge gets extensions, but the reality is that millions of people still use IE11 and it should be supported.

I stopped using IE because I was having a lot of the problems you describe, especially the sticking and locking up ones. I switched to Chrome and have not looked back. Edge is too plain and like you said, lacks extensions. You are not stuck on IE though. Other browsers, like Chrome, Firefox, Maxthon, Opera, etc use the same extensions IE does. Have you tried opening up the XDA page in another browser just to troubleshoot? If you want to stay on IE, you can try deleting your IE cache and junk files, reset it to default settings, or even try putting the XDA webpage in compatibility mode and see if that helps. Try opening up IE with all plug-ins disabled, again, just for troubleshooting . Another note about IE. Microsoft just dropped support for versions 10 and below, and I will bet version 11 will be the last of it.

I had this problem recently. It's good to see it wasn't just my usual bad luck!
I do most of my modding at work (sshh..) and our IT department has recently moved everybody over to IE from Chrome. It is noticeably worse at displaying this forum and is, to be honest, a horrible program to use. I even miss Navigator..
Good to see I'm not the only one suffering, though!

I also have a lot of trouble using IE11 on XDA.
For the past few months I have had all the problems listed in the original post.
Now it seems like the page layout problems has been fixed, but for now I can not load a single page on XDA without IE11 locking up.
I have had more problems loading pages on XDA the past few months, than I have had on all other websites combined for the past 10 years - nothing but trouble on XDA..
It must be possible to make this site compatible with IE11, right?
(FYI: I am not using IE11 to write this post - it would be impossible)

gruntyoldbag said:
I also have a lot of trouble using IE11 on XDA.
For the past few months I have had all the problems listed in the original post.
Now it seems like the page layout problems has been fixed, but for now I can not load a single page on XDA without IE11 locking up.
I have had more problems loading pages on XDA the past few months, than I have had on all other websites combined for the past 10 years - nothing but trouble on XDA..
It must be possible to make this site compatible with IE11, right?
(FYI: I am not using IE11 to write this post - it would be impossible)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm getting that as well. It's very depressing...but it's good to know that it's not just me.