Websites occasionally don't load all the way. What are some possible causes?

Question

Sometimes when I load a webpage, it stops before the entire page has loaded. Maybe the CSS didn't register correctly, or the layout is funky. But when I refresh it loads properly.

What causes this? Does the connection get interrupted? What would cause the interruption and why doesn't the browser recognize this? I'm just curious.

What browser are you using? This is a common problem with opera 10. — Force Flow, Nov 01 '10 at 21:00
Have you been adjusting the MTU values in your router recently? — paradroid, Nov 02 '10 at 02:54

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 01 '10 at 20:54

Some reasons I encountered are:

Cross-site: Content on the page comes from several sources, some of them are slow or non-existent
Some part of the page is generated dynamically by javascript that needs to access Web data or has a bug
The item referred to on the page was deleted or renamed
Some part of the page was blocked by an extension such as Adblock or NoScript
Badly written or badly maintained page

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 19 '12 at 02:22

Do you have a DSL connection? PPPoE, which many DSL providers use to transport your traffic from the DSL modem to the DSL provider's routers, has an MTU of 1492 (because the PPPoE overhead is 8 bytes). The standard Ethernet MTU is 1500.

I believe if you change the MTU of the network interface connected to your DSL router to 1492 as well the problem should clear up if this is cause.

You may try upgrading the firmware in your DSL modem as well while you are at it.

Websites occasionally don't load all the way. What are some possible causes?

2 Answers2