aju
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Post by aju on Jan 12, 2021 11:56:45 GMT
Okay so I don't have to do much work these days having withdrawn much of our funding bit am still left with quite a bit to check on zopa. I usually remove funds every few days or so but I've noticed that Zopa sites seem to be getting stuck at a number of connections that in my view are of little use to me. The sites in particular seem to be
analytics.twitter.com
bat.bing.com (I think I got that right!)
The names are not that important but I wondered has anybody tried blocking these sites in the hosts file eg
I've done this before for advert sites but these may be more critical. The two I spotted were particularly slow and made them more visible i'd have to go through google developer tools to find all of the superfluous ones that to be honest i cannot see they add value to my experience.
Anyone else tried this to speed up access to the zopa screens?.
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benaj
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Post by benaj on Jan 12, 2021 13:29:58 GMT
Ads? What kind of ads?
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aju
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Post by aju on Jan 12, 2021 14:50:25 GMT
You can block ad servers, the ones that paste adverts all over some sites, by just entering the sites name and using the pointer to your machine the 127.0.0.1 part and they will take up space on the screen still - you need an extension to block those parts out - but it means you don't see ads. (There are sites that supply standard ad server lists that you just slot into the hosts file these are usually the worst offenders). I did a bit more digging using the Chrome developer tools and this approach may not work as a lot of these items are created by javascript and other under the hood functions. Most of what sites are using is what's known as google tag manager ( GTM) stuff I think that's used to give Zopa and I guess all the business stuff methods of tracking and laying down cookies and other analytic stuff that can be used to track us and our actions. I can't remember if I can just change the hosts file without having to reboot but if i get some spare time i'll just try a few and see what happens. Thing is a lot of it doesn't just have tags and the like they actually have a lot of script and code etc inserted into a page. Sometime this code is misused or worse not understood properly and can cause problems too. It was just a thought and a shock at the amount of injected code for analytics across many different browsers etc that us as users are not that bothered about and very annoying when it slows down our access to already slow sites like Zopa. I checked Lloyds bank and they have the same stuff too but I guess their systems are much faster than Zopa's - I'm guessing its normal stuff but as more and more sites are using analytics the end servers where all this is accessed from start to become slower and slower.
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aju
Member of DD Central
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Likes: 924
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Post by aju on Jan 12, 2021 15:47:33 GMT
So i tried changing the hosts file on my windows machine for
127.0.0.1 analytics.twitter.com
and I was able to login so far but got spurious connection errors - i think that was it. I took the entry out and tried again and was able to login but when I got to the meat of the site there was a notice that some parts may not be available so I'll try again when its more stable. (I'm not sure if I should have cleared the cookies for Zopa which may be an issue with the changes i made.
Whilst i'm pretty certain that the errors i got were not connected to the current reported site issues I reckon that masking out the relevant sites this way will cause connection problems as elements may be checking for certain cookies that will no longer be there.
Edit: Oops probably should just forget it. so I changed quite a few that seemed to change some things, nothing actually broke as far as i could tell. I was just about to make a load more changes when I realised that this wouldn;t just affect Zopa but all services that may or may not use these functions. whilst I'm ok with that mostly it started become a bit of a "Sledgehammer to crack a nut" in other words it will be affecting more than just Zopa. Below is how far I got and perhaps there is a way to do this in say an extension that only affects Zopa but at present whilst the systems messages of potential problems has gone the system is way slower than it was this morning!.
#Blocked sites added to try and fix speed issues by limiting unnecessary slow loads with zopa.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics
127.0.0.1 analytics.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 bat.bing.com
127.0.0.1 googleleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 googletagmanager.com
If anyone else has any ideas then feel free to chip in.
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Post by mfaxford on Jan 12, 2021 17:03:59 GMT
Okay so I don't have to do much work these days having withdrawn much of our funding bit am still left with quite a bit to check on zopa. I usually remove funds every few days or so but I've noticed that Zopa sites seem to be getting stuck at a number of connections that in my view are of little use to me. The sites in particular seem to be analytics.twitter.com bat.bing.com (I think I got that right!) I don't know much about those, but from memory of looking at google analytics a few years ago that shouldn't have any noticeable impact on page loading times, it's supposed to all happen in the background after the page is loaded (which might be why it shows up if you're looking for things that look slow). I'd assume other analytics should work in the same way. Edit: Oops probably should just forget it. so I changed quite a few that seemed to change some things, nothing actually broke as far as i could tell. I was just about to make a load more changes when I realised that this wouldn;t just affect Zopa but all services that may or may not use these functions. whilst I'm ok with that mostly it started become a bit of a "Sledgehammer to crack a nut" in other words it will be affecting more than just Zopa. Below is how far I got and perhaps there is a way to do this in say an extension that only affects Zopa but at present whilst the systems messages of potential problems has gone the system is way slower than it was this morning!. Some of the Ad Blocker extensions can also block a lot of the common analytics engines (at least they did when I last looked at google analytics a few years ago). The one I've used in the past that I think did this was uBlock Origin, but I'm sure others do as well.
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Post by fuzzyiceberg on Jan 12, 2021 21:06:06 GMT
Perehaps their forthcoming site maintenance will address these issues?
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aju
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Post by aju on Jan 13, 2021 0:32:51 GMT
Perehaps their forthcoming site maintenance will address these issues? Lets hope so but sadly they have promised speed increases in the past and nothing seems to improve, I do use selective pages to speed up the process most times but one has to make sure that log out has cleared cookies to prevent false logins that log one out immediately. Sometimes even using these techniques its still blindingly slow. RS seems to be super fast in comparison to Zopa site. Time will tell...
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