Very slow YouTube and Google loading speeds and timing out

cptual — Mon, 01 May 2023 12:50:55 GMT

Package: Full Fibre 500

Every day, particularly when I open YouTube and Google for the first time, it takes absolutely ages to load. I have to retry multiple times over a couple of minutes over different tabs and then it finally randomly decides to start working again and actually load the page.

This issue then reoccurs maybe an hour or two into any session - note that the YouTube loading and Google loading are both independent of each other. One working doesn't affect the other.

All other speeds and connections are completely fine. I've tried multiple browsers and the same is happening. There is also no firewall and port or anything of the sort being blocked. This has occurred since I first got the connection, 1 to 2 months ago.

It's getting pretty annoying as it's happening frequently daily and I use both of these sites a lot.

There's another post which I've linked below which details almost exactly the issue I'm having - it seems that there are some BT-specific connections being made. It also looks like this can be temporarily fixed, but then starts reoccurring for some reason - maybe because some of these connections are refreshed/newly generated so those endpoints aren't static, which causes the problem to occur again after X amount of time.

The below issue was marked as solved, but looks like only a temporary fix and specifically for YouTube only.

Related issue: Slow / long Youtube load/seek times

https://community.bt.com/t5/Home-setup-Wi-Fi-network/Slow-long-Youtube-load-seek-times/td-p/2289555

Re: Very slow YouTube and Google loading speeds and timing out

csiwek — Thu, 04 May 2023 09:39:43 GMT

Hi @cptual , I'm the author of the post you've linked and I am happy with the solution so far.

Try digging into where the issue is.

I used Chrome Developer Tools for that. Switch to the network tab and refresh the page (shift-F5 to bypass the local cache).

What I noticed is that one of the components that are being loaded by youtube (a javascript file) takes over 5 seconds (but sometimes over 15s) to load

That showed me that there is an issue with YT edge caches that are being hosted inside the BT network.

I also noticed that my Adguard ad blocker is slowing things down as YT is trying to load trackers multiple times but that's the price I need to pay to block the ads.

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Very slow YouTube and Google loading speeds and timing out

Re: Very slow YouTube and Google loading speeds and timing out