Anyone know why AW would kill my internet?

Even as tech naive as I am, I can assure you it wasn't AW.

It's not AW.

I'd suggest that you try creating a new User account (not an Admin) via System Preferences and see if the same thing happens.

It sounds like your network timeout is set too short, and that's affecting slower-responding sites (like AW). I have no idea where one would check that on a Mac, but it's generally an operating-system thing, which is why it affects all browsers. But the browser doesn't have an error message for such that, so it produces the best one it has, which is often "Unable to connect".

This was a common problem back in the Dark Age of Dialup, and the solution was to set the timeout considerably longer than the default.

Because it deserves it.

caw

Reziac said:

It sounds like your network timeout is set too short, and that's affecting slower-responding sites (like AW). I have no idea where one would check that on a Mac, but it's generally an operating-system thing, which is why it affects all browsers. But the browser doesn't have an error message for such that, so it produces the best one it has, which is often "Unable to connect".

This was a common problem back in the Dark Age of Dialup, and the solution was to set the timeout considerably longer than the default.

Click to expand...

AW is a slow responding site? It seems instantaneous, to me.

bettielee said:

ok, I will look at this - sometimes it will say "unable to connect" and then all of a sudden the page will load - and for me, AW is one of the slowest loading sites. If that doesn't work I'll try the 2nd user that's not admin.

Click to expand...

Browser is automatically trying to refresh the page, hence the "suddenly it loads".

Couldn't find any info about how to change the setting on a Mac, tho I did find complaints about the recent OS update having made it have timeout issues connecting to a wireless router.

Jamesaritchie said:

AW is a slow responding site? It seems instantaneous, to me.

Click to expand...

It's usually been slow to glacial for me (even when the whole rest of the world is fast), and has been so from four widely-scattered locations in the western U.S. and on three different ISPs. Tho sometimes it responds instantly, and I'm astonished.

Anyone know why AW would kill my internet?

Click to expand...

Spite?

AW is one of the most problematic websites for me as well. Now I'm in Malaysia which complicates things, but whether I'm surfing on a Mac or a PC I have constant problems with it.

Ad-blockers help and I suspect there is some rogue javascript running that is causing my problems.

I find it to be one of the slower sites as well. But I've got used to it so.....

It's not the page display that's slow for me -- that part is fine, at least with the site's own javascript. Tho I run NoScript, and only AW's own javascript is allowed to execute (and I have googlesyndication.com blocked in HOSTS because it's always slower'n shit and tends to hang up page display everywhere).

So when AW is slow, it's the actual response time from server to me. Sometimes when it's really slow, Ping to AW will time out.

It's weird to see so many accounts of the site loading slowly. It's usually one the best for me.

Could this be a regional hang-up?

Where/how I've visited AW:

north Los Angeles county; one hop from an AT&T backbone (fixed wireless)
Boise, Idaho; Qwest/CenturyLink (DSL)
western Montana; Verizon reseller (fixed wireless)
eastern Montana; CenturyLink (DSL)

And in about four years here, I've found AW is consistently among the slowest-responding sites. For comparison, City-Data's forum runs the same software and has 100x as many users, but typically responds very fast.

<goes off, looks up AW's hosting>
http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=absolutewrite.com&x=0&y=0
...and GoDaddy-hosted sites tend to get real slow under much of a load. (Word around is they kinda oversell their services.)

At any rate, when a site responds slowly it can produce that timeout error. And that can make the "internet look broken" (or seem to "be broken by" a particular site) because the repeated effort to reach a site can peg your system's CPU at 100% usage, so nothing works until it times out and gives up.

I used to have this problem, or a similar one. I suspect it was the ads as it stopped once I started using an ad blocker.

ETA: read properly, don't skim Maythe... I had a problem where I got diverted to an ad site, not one that I could see was advertising on AW, even though I hadn't clicked on anything. So probably not the same problem at all.