Not much about this to be found online, but for the past couple of days, Facebook has been waiting eternally on one of several servers after displaying the first page of entries. The commonest address it hangs on is:
s-static.ak.facebook.com
Any thoughts about this? Chrome does the same thing, suggesting that it’s not a browser issue but a local configuration issue…except that I haven’t done anything to the router configuration or the XP network configuration for a long time.
Javascript is enabled, and unloading NoScript doesn’t help. If this doesn’t get fixed soon I’m going to simply stop reading the damned thing. Software that breaks itself without provocation is not generally welcome around here. Not for long, anyway.
UPDATE: The fix (for me at least) was to enable the MTU setting in my Linksys router and set the MTU value to 1454. That’s a sort of “golden” value that appears to be the optimal packet size on PPPoE connections. I’m still puzzled as to why this would alluvasudden be a problem (I’ve had the MTU setting disabled and the default value of 1500 in force for years) unless Facebook were doing some tweaking on the server side. That said, modernmechanix.com now works as well, and I had pretty much given up on it. If you have problems with Web sites hanging unpredictably, this is an easy fix (assuming your router provides the option) and should be the first thing you try.
I quick Google search turned up this:
http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-274-problem-connecting-certain-websites
Yes, saw that almost right off; thanks. I tried a few of those things and nothing changed. Nothing, that is, until I enabled the MTU setting in the router and set MTU size to 1454. Boom! Facebook is behaving. (See the Update to this entry.)
That seems odd that the MTU setting would make such a difference. Degraded performance is understandable but just… not… functioning? Another quick dip into Google shows many other people have experienced the same problem.
It looks like internet access hasn’t yet reached the “appliance” stage where you plug it in and it just works.
I’m glad you were able to resolve the problem with a simple MTU change. A while back, I was having similar issues (certain web sites taking forever), and I eventually realized that my ISP’s DNS servers were “flaky,” to put it kindly. Steve Gibson has a free DNS benchmark (http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm) that can help figure out if you’re having any DNS-related issues, and show which nameservers respond the fastest from your location. (Be sure to download the extended nameserver list if/when it prompts you to do so.) In my case, the improvement after changing nameservers was dramatic; it felt almost like I had upgraded to a higher speed connection.
I dumped all ISP provided DNS and moved to OpenDNS 6 years ago and never looked back. And the control over filtering is awesome.
Thanks, changing the MTU worked for me too.
did not have this problem till I accepted a downdoad from “knowledgepanel.com”. Since then My computer will not shut off- I must un-plug it.
Thanks, Jeff, for covering this. It began happening to me today—three years on. Like you, I made no setting changes. It must be down to Facebook tinkering.