TD Pool Banners Sink Blueyonder Users
- 1 Comment
Earlier in the week we started getting complaints off users that access to Loquax was slow, often taking minutes to load in! A check on their ISPs and strangely all are using Blueyonder. Apparently the issue started on Friday 31st August and was causing such a problem that people actually couldn’t use the site.
Some users contacted Blueyonder, and they, after doing checks, blamed us for the problem. We contacted our hosts, and they couldn’t find anything untoward either. Traceroutes also showed that there were no problems. All very baffling - so we blamed Blueyonder! The issue stayed at stalemate until late Friday night when one user explained how they got so far downloading a page and then it stopped… and it stopped at the location of our Tradedoubler pool banner!
A quick snip of the code, and suddenly everyone is loading in pages like there’s no tomorrow! Why the banners only caused serious issues for Blueyonder users remains a mystery, but that’s the end of using Tradedoubler banner pools - which we only used as a filler and because it saved messing about updating things.
It might be worth checking your own sites - especially if you have pool banners in use.
No Banner Rotation With Networks?
Now that TD banner pools have been sunk, I did hope to find a replacement with another network - but it seems the old banner has well and truly had it’s day. We have widgets and content units but nothing as simple as a 468×60 banner rotation system.
All I want to be able to do is select from one network’s pool of merchants a series of banners with good promotional messages (discount codes, competitions, offers etc) and then leave that happily running whilst the banners get updated at regular intervals by the merchants. I know I can write my own ad rotation code and I know there are other options to using a 468×60 banner, but the TD pool was nice in that it required little effort to look after - just a shame it was stopping people using the site!
1 Comments on this post
Trackbacks
-
tbp said:
I expect this was actually a DNS problem. Sometimes the ISP’s DNS servers lose an entry or receive a corrupted entry.
I expect this happened on Blueyonders server, that they lost the entry for the tradedoubler domain. Anyone viewing your page would see things hang when the browser tried to request the ad from tradeboubler, as it wouldn’t be be able to resolve tradedoubler.com and so the browser would wait for the DNS timeout before it could continue loading the page.
I had exactly the same problem with A4U last week, with the pages hanging for about 2 - 3 minutes before they would load. Doing a view source showed that it stopped at the ad banner at the top of the page. Pinging the domain of the ad server on my PC revealed that my ISP had lost the domains entry, and so it couldn’t be resolved and the hanging was down to waiting for the timeout to kick in. This was solved by manually adding the IP address and domain in my windows hosts file, so it could be resolved locally, and straight away the pages loaded near instantly again. Had nothing to do with A4u, nothing was wrong at their end, it was an issue with my ISP’s DNS server. Unfortunately this does happen occassionally!
September 12th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
