Why is one particular site loading slowly for me?

Question

I have a Mac with OS 10.4 which is about 5 years old. Never had any problems, but it loads one particular website really slowly (it takes like 4-5 minutes).

Troubleshooting so far

• Cleared the cache
• Cleared cookies
• Talked with my ISP (who were no help due to me using a Mac!)
• Changed DNS
• Rebooted everything
• Upgraded browser

You name it, I've done it.

I can get to other sites in a second, but not this one. I can get on right away with anonymouse, but not on any browser. I can also get to this site from the PCs in my house, so I think it's my Mac.

The site is www.relylocal.com. I'm using Firefox and Safari. It loads slow on both.

Answer 1

Your first step should be to ping the site and see if you have poor latency (100ms or more), if the latency is the issue run tracert and see if there is a particular hop where you are getting held up. If you find the hop that is giving you issues you now have ammunition when you call the ISP. IF that still works fine try browsing to the IP that the site resolves to, this will rule out any DNS issues as you are contacting the server directly.

Answer 2

If its only 1 site that loads slowly, its most likely just a slow site, especially if it happens like that in two separate browsers.

Alternatively, it could be due to large files, etc that need downloaded that your older computer is having trouble processing. It doesn't seem like much could be done about it, in my opinion.

Answer 3

It sounds like the site itself is having server or javascript loading issues. Also, it could be that the site is loading ads or images from another site which is having trouble. Have you tried from another browser (on your mac)? For example, firefox, chrome, opera? You might want to open a terminal and try to access the URL using wget or similar tool, which will download just the raw page itself and give some stats on it. If you have firefox, you could install the firebug extension which has a lot of tools for debugging this kind of thing as well.