Site running incredibly slowly past 2 days now

I hope I’m posting this in the correct place. I check the site usually once a week, looking at whatever was posted throughout the previous week and downloading what I like. Well as of yesterday and continuing today the site is just running extremely slowly. I’m talking things like taking upwards of nearly 2 minutes just to load a single page of images, going onto an image itself and that taking a long time to load and even see the image, and even downloading images that aren’t even 1 MB large is taking so long that some of them are being cancelled by my browser because it thinks there is an issue.

I do not seem to be having issues on any other site, I can scroll through images and videos just fine anywhere else, as well as download things on other sites smoothly. My internet is also working perfectly, nobody in my home is having problems with it. It seems to exclusively be with this site.

I haven’t seen anyone else speaking about this so I really hope it’s not just a me issue.

@Volca
Are you in Russia, or does your internet go through Russia? Because if so, well, Russia doesn’t like this site (or a whole lot of other things).

Otherwise, it may be a Cloudflare node near you is congested or having issues.

@The Smiling Pony
Hi, no I am not located in Russia, I’m from the U.S., more specifically the East Coast. From a quick search it doesn’t seem like there are any Cloudflare issues near my location, however I’ll continue to look further to see if there really is an issue.

@Volca
Is the slowdown present when using a different browser?

I’ve been having this same issue. To answer your question, yes, the slowdown is present in other browsers, both in and out of incognito mode. My internet works perfectly fine with every other website, except notably FurAffinity has also been slower the last few days, but not so much as Derpibooru has.

Same issue here, been going on for a little while now. Indiana, happens across all browsers and devices, no VPNs or anything, no other sites affected. The issues persist across both the images and the forums, as it took a solid 2 or 3 minutes just to load this page in order for me to post this.

@Nimble Wing
Can you try with a VPN?

@The Smiling Pony
Ok, weirdly enough, the issue immediately goes away when I enable my VPN. Not sure if that info helps, and I don’t know enough about this sort of thing to really do much with it.

Also chiming in from east coast US here to say, this site is being slow and another popular (adult) image site (rule34.xxx) is being extremely slow to load for me as well.

Just out of curiosity… does anyone else experiencing this issue have Xfinity as their ISP? I’m beginning to become suspicious. (I don’t have a VPN to test with)

@Foiposop
Hi, after reading your reply I checked and I am also experiencing issues on the site you mentioned, and even others such as e621. I do also have Xfinity as my internet provider, and after a recent test, I’m now 99% certain they’re what’s causing the slowdown on these sites.

As a test, I used my phone which has Verizon as a personal hotspot, and connected my computer to it for Internet. Nearly immediately, the site is now loading at the incredibly fast speeds that of which it normally always did. I now think it is entirely a possibility that Xfinity is purposefully slowing down connections to popular NSFW image hosting sites.

@Volca
Does this happen as well with more “mainstream” NSFW sites?

If you run a tracert, is the slowdown after it hits xfinity’s network or inside it?

(I really hate ISPs)

I also have Xfinity and notice this site is super slow too. What the hell are they doing? Net Neutrality was restored in the US.

I’ve run a tracert and the slowdown happens for me in comcast’s network or as its trying to leave it. I’ve asked a couple of friends who live in my region, who also have xfinity, to check for issues and it works fine for them - but they both live in (different parts of) another state. We all live in, more specifically, the southeast. My data starts having issues when it gets to Marietta, GA (which is just outside of Atlanta).

I’m wondering if this might be an issue with a specific path all of our data is taking, perhaps a bad hop, rather than some kind of censorship from Xfinity. Although if this issue was affecting websites that didn’t also have adult content, i’d be more confident in that hypothesis…

I have the same issue in Poland with a local independent provider, so it’s not Xfinity’s fault at least.

Can you try disabling http3 in your browser and see if the issue persists? I just had it crop up in firefox and realized it wasn’t happening in chrome, so then I tried disabling http3 and the issue cleared up.

@byte[]
Thank you! It seems to have solved the issue. Methods for different browsers:

Google Chrome

In the browser address bar, type chrome://flags. Disable the Experimental QUIC protocol option.

Microsoft Edge

In the browser address bar, type edge://flags/. Disable the Experimental QUIC protocol option.

Mozilla Firefox

In the browser address bar, type about:config. Disable the network.http.http3.enable option.

Opera

In the browser address bar, type opera://flags/#enable-quic. From the Experimental QUIC protocol drop-down list, select Disabled.

@byte[]
This solved the issue for me, too, and not just on this website. Thanks!

I had considered it might be a Firefox issue but when I still had the massive slowdown on Edge I thought it was my ISP. I am curious as to why this would affect only specific sites, and download speeds too. But at least we seem to have an answer.