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Correia994

: Pages that never finish loading: How to diagnose Users occasionally complain, and we probably all occasionally see, a web page that never finishes loading. In Google Chrome the spinning circle

@Correia994

Posted in: #Browsers #Bugs #Http

Users occasionally complain, and we probably all occasionally see, a web page that never finishes loading. In Google Chrome the spinning circle will run forever, each browser has it's own version.

One common cause is a web server that reports the wrong length for a document. The browser will wait forever for bytes that never come.

But that's not the only cause. How can one go about diagnosing a particular "never finishes loading" situation?

Edit:
Pages that do this all the time are pretty easy to find.
In particular I'm looking for tips to diagnose the intermittent issues, especially those where the page never loads (not just slow, these pages never report as done loading). Most pages these days have a mix of sources and probably a CDN or two, so it can get complex fast.

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@Connie744

If the "wheel just keeps spinning" then it means the browser thinks it is still loading something (from somewhere). If you open your browser developer tools -> network tab (and reload the page) it should eventually show "Loaded" at the bottom, in red, ex:



If it does then it may be spinning waiting on some XHR resource, not sure. If it doesn't then it's either stuck waiting, loading an initial resource (ex: javascript file that is referenced, or image), or it is running some "startup javascript" that is running forever and never terminating, or possibly causing "out of memory" for the page (ex: recursive loop generating too long of a string or what not).

For the waiting-on-resources, you might be able to see one in the "network" list that is attempting to load but not finishing.

For the javascript, I found I could run it in firefox, after awhile firefox will say "A web page is slowing down your browser. What would you like to do? [Stop it][Wait]".



If you click "[Stop it]" then in will basically interrupt the javascript that's "currently running" (possibly/probably the offending one), and in the javascript developer console it will show the backtrace which might give you hints as to what's going awry. Apparently similar behavior is possible in chrome (if it runs out of memory at least, open the developer tools, it'll abort and let you see a trace when it runs out, interrupting it might also be possible) but it was harder to read the trace in chrome's dev tools for me (didn't show full origin url's of each trace line as easily) FWIW.

The other links in the other answers were useful as well (one of them said, in my case "browser ran out of memory" or "unable to connect to server" all indications of my problem). Another possibly useful link is this.

In my case it appeared to have been a conflict between prototype.js #inspect and the google (gapi) plusone button, causing some kind of infinite loop [?] that made it eventually run out of memory. Updating prototype seemed to "fix" it.

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@Voss4911412

check the website or web page with Pingdom you will get a detailed list of files loading and the time consumed by each of them.


You could also use Yslow a addon for all the major browsers.
another option is Google Pagespeed. You can analyse your website or web page here. Here is also a Google Chrome addon is available.


My personal choice has always been pingdom for its detailed report.

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@Kristi941

You should do the following to get an exact reason why your page never finishes loading:


Do you call any 3rd party scripts on your page? If yes, then check if they respond properly.
Check your website/server for viruses and hacks.
Analyze your page here or here.
Make sure that your server's drive space is not full; it must have some extra space available.


The above site analyzers should help you to know why your page is loading very slowly.

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