Site is omega slow for me

Hi guys,

Love the site, have used it for years and been a multi year premium user. However, since I last subscribed (late January or so), the site seems to load incredibly slowly for me and I don't know what's changed.

Here is a video of my 50mb connection go from typing in the URL to watching a video. I managed to upload this video to Streamable quicker than I could watch something on GB. I just watch through YouTube now as it's so slow. https://streamable.com/32gol

Is there something I can do? (please ignore torrent service being open, nothing was in use at the time)

Hi y'all,

Wanted to echo OP's sentiments here and also note that the website has been incredibly slow for me. Specifically loading and watching videos in HD. I'm a longtime premium user and have an 80mbps wi-fi connection. If I had to guess, this overall slowdown has perhaps coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and with, what I suppose, is much higher site traffic. So that could be the reason. I'm sure the team is aware of this and is doing their best! But nevertheless, I am practically unable to load and watch videos for more than a minute or so at a time. Even shorter ones like Best of Giant Bomb. Bummer!

Hope everyone is well.

@trip___: @ivanetc: This sounds like it sucks for you, i hope it starts working soon. Meanwhile, be sure to try all the different things you can try to figure this out.

You should try this fastly speed test: http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest-for-fastly:cdn Fastly is the same CDN that giant bomb uses, i get about 100-60 mbps down.

Stuff like browser browser and OS details. (the first video kind of covered that for the original post)

What's your general location?

Have you tried other browsers? Other devices? Other connections? (4g on your phone).

Do you have a VPN you could try it with as a test? Or maybe you are using a VPN for work stuff and forgot to disable it?

@#1trip__ This is a great time for the site. Many are at home and using their services and interacting with a plethora of creative content. The slower speeds may be hampering your enjoyment but we know the content is here and still quality. I hope things improve for you, and stay safe. Fix

Having the same problem. If I'm lucky I can stream videos in the lowest quality without buffering every ~10-30 seconds.

The Fastly speedtest gives me 37 Mb/s for the first test, 407 Mb/s for the second test.

@reking: @ivanetc: @trip___: Where are you all physically located? Do videos on GameSpot show the same issues?

@rorie: I'm currently at my parents' place in Switzerland. I should say that, shortly after my post above, I changed from HTML5 to Progressive and that seemed to really help. My folks were also having problems with our repeater/antenna, which we subsequently switched out for a new one. Now there no longer seems to be an issue at all on my end. Sorry for all the back and forth and thanks for getting back to me!

@rorie - I'm also having similar problems. (Located in Ontario Canada)

I noticed that newer videos streamed just fine, so I looked at some of the numbers in the debug backtick dialog box during video playback. Of the new videos I watched, my `current bandwidth` was reported at 100M. On some older videos, my `current bandwidth` barely floats around 1-3M.

I'm seeing some of these videos drop to lower resolutions very frequently.

Here is a video were I noticed this problem the most.

https://www.giantbomb.com/shows/kerbal-project-beast-part-15/2970-12641/free-video

Thanks for everything you guys do :)

@rorie Reporting in from Ontario Canada. I have issues with the videos specifically, the rest of the site seems OK, a little slower but not terrible. Most videos won't load at all in HD unless they are available on YouTube though. This is seen for both progressive and HTML5. I usually have used the HTML 5 setting for premium videos without issue unless they were really long, and then sometimes they would crash at the mid point, but it wasn't hard to refresh and start again from where it crashed. If I set it to auto it seems to be running at "low" and even then stops to buffer every 5 to 10 minutes. The latest Mass Alex and the Alex and Vinny American Trucker video are basically unwatchable for me at this point. Seems like most I try out default to "low" even though I have about 100 Mbps to Fastly, 110+ Mbps to Ookla in London, Ontario, both with negligible pings.

I've had some slow downs as well recently. Just in the past week or so though. The thumbnails on the lastest videos page take a while to load in and downloading videos is sometimes OK and sometimes painfully slow (50-100KB/sec slow).

I suspect the problem is with the CDN or datacenter though. With most of the world "working from home" the internet is probably getting hammered in general anyway :)

Currently downloading Ep. 4 of Abby's 100 baby challenge and it's going very slow from Equinix SV1 in San Jose (via Fastly). My ping to it is fine though (for being 10,000km away).

UK here, getting only ~5Mbps a lot recently for newer and older vids. That's when I can actually play a video, since they mostly sit there without a thumbnail and clicking to play does nothing.

@achenar: Mine are doing the same, I'm not sure why, they just won't play.

Getting the same thing for the past couple of days. China here and the connection to the outside has been solid these days.

@achenar said:

UK here, getting only ~5Mbps a lot recently for newer and older vids. That's when I can actually play a video, since they mostly sit there without a thumbnail and clicking to play does nothing.

@emohobo: @emohobo: @achenar: If you have that black screen, tried disabling ublock origin? Or backed up your ublock settings and then reset to default?

Hi. Chiming in from Norway here, with a similar problem. Started recently and suddenly for me. None of my devices were able to play videos on GB (and Gamespot, I found out after someone in this thread suggested testing it). Or at least the loading was taking so long that I never had the patience to find out if they eventually do play.

I think I've tracked down part of the issue, though. I run a PiHole DNS ad blocker on my wifi. I noticed that whenever a GB page is loaded, a query goes out to cdn.cookielaw.org, which is subsequently blocked and rerouted to 0.0.0.0 by the PiHole. If I whitelist this url, videos work again. The query is then forwarded to 208.67.220.220, which is the same IP as giantbomb1.cbsistatic.com.

The full log for the cookielaw query is as follows:

May 10 12:44:56 dnsmasq[609]: query[A] cdn.cookielaw.org from <my.wifi.ip> 
May 10 12:44:56 dnsmasq[609]: forwarded cdn.cookielaw.org to 208.67.220.220 
May 10 12:44:56 dnsmasq[609]: reply cdn.cookielaw.org is <CNAME> 
May 10 12:44:56 dnsmasq[609]: reply cookielaw-cdn.azureedge.net is <CNAME> 
May 10 12:44:56 dnsmasq[609]: reply cookielaw-cdn.ec.azureedge.net is <CNAME> 
May 10 12:44:56 dnsmasq[609]: reply scdn1.wpc.7e7ef.kappacdn.net is <CNAME> 
May 10 12:44:56 dnsmasq[609]: reply sni1gl.wpc.kappacdn.net is 152.199.21.175  

Is there something in the CBSi servers that hangs while waiting for whatever it is that the call to cdn.cookielaw.org is supposed to accomplish? If so, I think this must be a recently added feature, since I've been running the PiHole for about a year with no issues concerning GB videos.

I ran into the same issue (can't play videos), and I have a PiHole. whitelisting cdn.cookielaw.org worked to fix it for me.

@forcen: Doing this allows the video thumbnails to show up, but clicking play still does nothing. The videos can be accessed with the download link though.

I also noticed the cookielaw domain issue recently since I tend to block third party domain scripts by default, sounds related to all the GDPR stuff. You could block all kinds of domains that related to that stuff and still get the site working, I guess that wasn't intended so they fixed it.

@achenar Check if the page gives you any weird errors in the console, does your browser let you connect to that cookielaw domain for example?