What's wrong with Google?

[TheTravellers]

For the past few days, almost any website I go to takes a loooooooooong time to load and it's always "connecting to *.googleapis.com" or "connecting to *.gstatic.com", and google.com even takes a long time to load. Can't find anything online about it, even on the "is it down or just me" type of websites, and google's dashboard says all their apps are green, but *something's* wrong somewhere in google-land, I think. Anybody know anything? Frustrating that so many websites are tied in with facebook, google, etc., that you can't get a page loaded if anything is FUBARed.

[kevinpate]

Is it possibly time to review your machine for malware?
No noticeable google issues for me for a long, long time

[windowphobe]

You might try experimenting with Google's own DNS to replace the one you get from your ISP. (IP is 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4.)

[tfvc.org]

Try clearing your cookies/cache/ check for plugins causing issues.

[Jim Kyle]

For the past few days, almost any website I go to takes a loooooooooong time to load and it's always "connecting to *.googleapis.com" or "connecting to *.gstatic.com", and google.com even takes a long time to load. Can't find anything online about it, even on the "is it down or just me" type of websites, and google's dashboard says all their apps are green, but *something's* wrong somewhere in google-land, I think. Anybody know anything? Frustrating that so many websites are tied in with facebook, google, etc., that you can't get a page loaded if anything is FUBARed.

Many sites, including this one, seem to be using the display fonts created by Google, and consequently must download them each time you enter -- and sometimes, each time you move to a new page. When traffic on the Google servers providing those components gets heavy, the access takes an unacceptably long time.

The only solution I know is simply to be patient. My systems are able to switch between workspaces, so I can simply toggle to the other one when that happens, and play a few hands of FreeCell while waiting for the page to finish loading!

[tfvc.org]

[Thomas Vu]

Is it possibly time to review your machine for malware?
No noticeable google issues for me for a long, long time

+1 for malware.

[TheTravellers]

No malware, no viruses, been a sys admin for decades, my computers are fine. It's been intermittent, and when you go to a site and it hangs there while loading and says down on the bottom "Waiting for/Connecting to blahblah", it's not DNS, malware, a virus, or anything like that 99.99999999999% of the time, it's that that specific site you're trying to get to is having problems, and it's always been limited to google-type sites, no other sites wait like that. It's cleared up today, so their weirdness might be over. Thanks for the replies, though.

[TheTravellers]

Many sites, including this one, seem to be using the display fonts created by Google, and consequently must download them each time you enter -- and sometimes, each time you move to a new page. When traffic on the Google servers providing those components gets heavy, the access takes an unacceptably long time.

The only solution I know is simply to be patient. My systems are able to switch between workspaces, so I can simply toggle to the other one when that happens, and play a few hands of FreeCell while waiting for the page to finish loading!

Heh, yep, I've just been switching to another tab in Firefox and going to a site that doesn't rely that heavily on google fonts, apis, or google-analytics and just waited until the circle stops spinning on the original tab.

[Jim Kyle]

I'm on Uverse, and the TV was going out (along with the rest of the internet) far too often last night and this morning. Checked for unexpected packets, using WireShark, and didn't see anything resembling malware activity. However, by mid-morning things had gotten so bad that I could not access the control interface of my 2-Wire "gateway" to check status or re-boot it!

I finally just pulled the power plug on the modem unit, waited some 30 seconds for charge to leak out, then reconnected power and watched somewhat nervously for it to re-boot and establish the WAN connection again.

When it did so, responses had become amazingly snappy! The only thing I can think of that would cause such a situation is for the modem circuitry to have gotten itself into a state the designers never anticipated. Having dealt with modems and the like since mid-1965, I've seen such situations many times, but this is the first I've encountered in which the gear continues to function but with greatly reduced performance. Usually it just quits totally!

It's been running as desired for some 4.5 hours now, with nary a stutter. Still uncomfortably slow when accessing the Google API site or their fonts, but no longer unusably so. Perhaps cold-rebooting the modem is a potential cure in your case also.

[TheTravellers]

If it would've kept on going, I probably would've done that, and the router too, but it's all back to normal today for me without me changing anything at all on my end, so I'll just keep on truckin' until it happens again, then might reboot things, thx for the tip, hadn't really thought that might be part of the problem...

[Jim Kyle]

It happens to my wireless set-top box for TV rather often. All front-panel lights come on, the signal vanishes, and no controls do anything at all. We've dubbed it the Christmas Tree effect. When it happens, I remove power by pulling the plug at the back of the box, leave it at least a full minute, then plug it back in. The box then has to boot itself and download its TV-decoding program, which takes several minutes, but that cures it. I think all this stuff nowadays is designed as finite-state machines, and the search for elegance means designers may not account for all possible states. They ignore the ones that "cannot possibly" be reached. That's simply an invitation to Murphy! Once in one of those impossible states, there's no way out. It's an infinite loop. An FSM should ALWAYS include a "none of the above" state to guard against such happenings, but that might increase the cost some fraction of a cent....

Perhaps I'm being a bit too curmudgeonly about this. The Christmas Tree may BE the none-of-the-above state!

[TheTravellers]

I so agree with you - so many things (and programs) aren't designed for a "oh ****, we don't have an option for this state", and it's sad. When I took programming, we were taught to *always* code a last bit for when it fell out of the condition checking if "none of the above" matched the circumstances, we just didn't let it fall through and freak out, we coded for every possible condition and then left an "unknown error" type of branch at the end, at the very least...

[zookeeper]

I so agree with you - so many things (and programs) aren't designed for a "oh ****, we don't have an option for this state", and it's sad. When I took programming, we were taught to *always* code a last bit for when it fell out of the condition checking if "none of the above" matched the circumstances, we just didn't let it fall through and freak out, we coded for every possible condition and then left an "unknown error" type of branch at the end, at the very least...

It's like the new video protocols. I'm amazed how many large websites still don't have HTML5 and fall back to Flash, which every security expert says not to bother with any longer - just remove it! But, some sites still require Flash for their videos. Most now offer up HTML5 with a "fall back" to Flash...some...very few... are the opposite. How hard is this?