Really dumb interwebz question...

[ricosuave]

Its something that I've wondered about, maybe even thought I knew the answer to, but...

Occasionally, I open a webpage that should look like this (as an example):
http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/6051/43318854.jpg

but it actually comes out like this:
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/6719/45540758.jpg

until I press F5 a few times.

Now, I have had Shaw regular service for some time, on a known 'low use' node, regularly clear cookies, update browsers, have wireless N with a clear channel range, etc etc etc.

Obviously, I think that the problem lies in the servers that connect me to such sites, however, in this day and age, why is this sort of thing happening, and is there anything I can do about it from my end?

[chalms04]

I dunno, but I just ordered a pizza to 903 25th ave. Hope you like Hawaiian!

[ricosuave]

LOL, Its not my place, but I'm sure they will

[photon]

Basically the site looks that way because it's not pulling down all the files. Nowadays the content of a site (the words) and the layout of the site (where the words go, how they look, what graphics go where) are often in 2 different files.

So what's happening is it's getting one file, but not the other.

As to why it's happening, could be a number of different reasons, and figuring out what it is can be challenging, especially if it's intermittent.

You can use something like PingPlotter to ping your router constantly to see if it's a connection problem from your PC to your router.. and you can ping your local internet gateway to see if it's a connectivity issue with your ISP.

This is assuming that ping will fail when the website requests fail, that's not always the case, so it could still be a connectivity issue even if ping works all the time.

It could also be a DNS problem, your computer isn't getting the IP address of the server for one of the two files (sometimes they are on different servers).. you can test this by switching to something like OpenDNS temporarily to see if that resolves the issue.

Could be a weird browser thing too, switch to a different browser for a while and see if it does the same thing.

In short, diagnosing an intermittent problem sucks.

[sclitheroe]

If you look specifically at the screenshots, the problem is a poorly coded website, where the loading of the rest of the stylesheets and other HTML elements has stalled loading, waiting on what is no doubt an ad or tracking element from pixel.quantserve.com. Quantserve.com appears to be a web metrics type service.

So crap website design, relying on crap third party services. Nothing you can do other than hit reload, as you noted, and hope that quantserve does better on the second request to their services.

[photon]

Lol good catch, I've had this asked of me a ton of times about CP not loading and I've given that answer, should have seen that there too.

So yeah, ignore what I said, I'm going through an intermittent Internet not working problem right now so everything looks like a nail I guess.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by photon

Lol good catch, I've had this asked of me a ton of times about CP not loading and I've given that answer, should have seen that there too.

So yeah, ignore what I said, I'm going through an intermittent Internet not working problem right now so everything looks like a nail I guess.

Hey you might know - what was the dealio with IVRNet’s outage the other day? Was not pleasant discovering that MX records for my clients disappeared from the internet for serveral hours.

[amorak]

From the looks of things, I'd say you have an older VW that needs to be upgraded...

Paging Pylon, paging Mr. Pylon...