Is Stuff cut off from the world?

Posted byLance Wiggs 12 Comments on Is Stuff cut off from the world?

For the last few days I’ve failed to get anything from Stuff.co.nz. Sure I am in Mozambique but NZHerald and everything else is working just fine, while others in DC and Singapore  have hinted at the same problem.

I’ve tried m.stuff.co.nz, and it did work – albeit unusably slowly.

What’s going on? Are others overseas having the same issue?

<update: via @spudooli and Toni and @livlarge: Stuff have run out of international bandwidth.

RT @NZStuff Heavy demand on Stuff has maxed out our international bandwidth and some users having trouble getting in. Increasing limits asap

Words fail me>

Published by Lance Wiggs

@lancewiggs

12 replies on “Is Stuff cut off from the world?”

  2. I’ve been having this issue also – I’m in Melbourne.

    @NZStuff has written on twitter:
    “Heavy demand on Stuff has maxed out our international bandwidth and some users having trouble getting in. Increasing limits asap. Thanks”

    This has been occurring for several days and is very disappointing from such a large site.

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  3. seems they share traffic with trademe.co.nz – which i guess doesn’t need much in the way of international.

    the recent hits regarding tsunamis etc has been the reason, but this is something they could have predicted, surely.

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  7. I’ve given up trying to access Stuff after weeks of lousy slow downloads across Europe, even in places with superfast broadband. It’s clearly not an NZ issue – the Herald downloads quickly even on slow patchy mobile broadband in rural areas.

    I think they may have too much clever stuff in their pages – all the extra tracking links etc tc seem to slow Stuff down even in NZ

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  8. I’ve noticed individual Stuff pages can be huge, in excess of 2MB. This is way over the top for 600 or so words of text, which could at a pinch be squeezed into 3 or 4 Kb.

    Sure there’s a need for advertising to pay the bills, but Fairfax pages are extremely heavy these days by any standard.

    Limit pages to, say, 500KB and it would be possible to have four times as much international traffic at the same cost.

    Or am I missing something obvious here?

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  10. @Keld

    I can see the page size reported when I read stuff on my Palm, frequently the pages are greater than 1.5 MB and on many occasions I’ve seen pages in excess of 2MB.

    A moment ago, on Wednesday at 11:00, using my desktop PC I loaded the stuff.co.nz homepage into the web page analyser at:

    http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso

    The result was 1633236 bytes. OK, that’s not 2MB, but at 1.6MB it isn’t much less.

    To underline my point, I also checked http://www.guardian.co.uk/ which weighed in at just 610KB.

    Stuff pages are bloated by any standard.

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  11. I just checked the Stuff homepage with Firebug and YSlow… the home page is about 2MB in size and scores an “E” for website performance (“F” is the worst.)

    From YSlow: “The page has a total of 120 components and a total weight of 2079.2K bytes”

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