John, the long pages with many videos don't seem to take very long to load, but maybe it is my connection. ...in fact, checking
speedtest.net, I get a download speed of 23.2. You?
Hi Steve,
The delay I'm speaking of seems to be due to each of the embedded videos needing to make contact with the outside, and download information about the video. If you click on page 35 (previous page), and then scroll up/down you will see most videos are only black spots until the video information is fetched from where ever it comes from.
My connection is fast/speedtest. Normally 50+, but as Fishmonger points out this is only a small part of the equation.
page 35 fully loads in 5 seconds on my ancient dual core laptop, 18mbps cable connection. In my office on 10gbps I can blow up the local speedtest server, but even there it takes a few seconds, probably because the servers need to access hard drives to retrieve the content. If all these videos were the viral kind that has millions of views, it would go much faster since they move those files into RAM caches or at least onto fast access SSD drives.
Note that each of these embedded videos consist several files that come from various servers, first an html page (the iframe you paste in), then usually a Flash player and some javascript files, a JPEG file as preview image that is then loaded. Youtube probably has some tracking files on there, which will come from a different server, and I am sure there's other stuff that requires your browser to go looking all over the place. The videos themselves aren't accessed at all until you click on one of the players.
I filter out about 1500 domain names on my system that are known junk that slow you down and do nothing but tell the big internet companies what you are up to or litter your screen with ads. Ditching these sites from your web experience makes things faster. Worth doing if you are not afraid to edit the "hosts" file on your PC:
how to make the internet suck less.
Did you know that a site like newegg.com loads over 200 different domains when you connect to their home page? 200+ servers, and many with nothing else to do but to slow you down while trying to track your internet activity. If you ever got an email from Amazon a day after just looking at something, offering a coupon code for the type of product you viewed, that's where all that crap comes from.
Even if you don't log in anywhere with a user name, they can identify you pretty clearly. Almost every client leaves behind a unique
fingerprint when it connects to a web server. The only way to protect yourself from such tracking is to block the sites that do that. See above link...
