THE "NORTON" INVESTIGATION - PART TWO

"I had a very poor experience with Norton slowing everything down - went to AVG and the problem went away."

"I run Norton 360 on my laptop with windows XP and do not have any problems with the speed."

"I found that the charts loaded slowly when I used both IE and Firefox but loaded immediately when using Safari."

"I use Norton Security software, with Windows 7, and I have not experienced any slow downs."

"I had very slow response times with the charts for several weeks. I disabled the Norton Toolbar (using Manage Add-ons) and the problem was solved."

"I use XP and Norton 4.2.0.12 without problem."

"I have Vista and Norton. Using AOL Stockcharts is extremely slow. Using IE 8 I have no problems.

Unfortunately, there's no clear consensus on the problem or a solution.  Lots of different reports but there's not much for our programmers to work with.  Again, we have tried (and tried and tried) to recreate this issue using a wide variety of software combinations but without any luck.  Our public Pingdom Response Time reports show that our average response time continues to decrease (as do our other non-public performance testing services).

All of this information points to some non-obvious-but-moderately-common combination of software and/or computer settings inside of certain web browsers that we cannot duplicate here.  So that means we need more help from you, especially if you are experiencing this slowdown.

IMPORTANT: Some of the following steps might harm your computer if you aren't careful.  Please do not perform any of these steps unless you are a very experienced computer user who is comfortable making changes to their configuration.  If you are not sure about changing a computer setting, don't!

If you are relatively computer savvy and comfortable with making changes to your computer (and you have a good hard disk backup, etc.), then please try the following steps and let us know what you discover by posting some comments in the box at the bottom of this article.

1.) Spend a little bit of time using StockCharts.com to get a sense of how fast our website currently is.  Visit the homepage, then click on one of the ticker symbols in the middle of the page.  Notice how long it takes before the chart appears.  Then click the "Update" button and see if it takes more or less time for the chart to reappear.  If things appear within 1 to 3 seconds then your performance is already pretty good and you really don't need to try the rest of these steps.  It's the people with the 8 seconds or longer response times that we really need to hear from.

2.) After you have a good idea of our current response speed, try clearing your browser's temporary file cache and restarting your computer.  This is always a good thing to try when you are having performance problems.  You can find the exact directions for clearing your cache on this page.

After restarting your computer (very important), revisit StockCharts.com and see if the speed of the website has changed significantly.  Two things to keep in mind: First, the first time you visit after clearing your cache, things might be slightly slower as we re-download the cacheable files but that delay should not happen on subsequent visits.  Second, we are looking for significant changes in performance - such as the times going from 20 seconds down to 2 seconds.  The difference between 20 seconds and 19 seconds is probably just due to randomness in the Internet.

3.) Next, run "Windows Update" (or "Software Update" on a Mac) and install any new recommended updates.  After all updates have been installed (you might need to check again after rebooting), see if our site's performance has improved significantly by repeating the first two steps again.  Let me know if it has using the comments box at the end of this article.

4.) Next, use a different web browser and re-run the first two steps.  If you normally use Internet Explorer, try Firefox.  If you normally use Firefox, try Chrome.  Opera is also a good thing to test.  All of these browsers are free to download and install.  Again, look to see if you experience a significant speed increase with any of them.  If so, let us know which ones work best and which ones remain slow.

5.) If you are behind an Internet router that has a firewall installed (most home routers like NetGear do), then, as a test, TEMPORARILY disable the security software in your computer and re-run the first two tests to see if things run faster.  Only do this if you are comfortable with you home network's security and you know what you are doing.  In addition, do not visit any other websites, open any emails, or run other programs with your security software disabled.  As soon as you have a good idea of how fast our website is working, immediately re-enable your computer's security software.

If things got faster when your security software was disabled, please check to see if things got slower again after you re-enabled your security software.  Let us know what you see.

6.) If you are experiencing slowness with the Firefox browser and you know how to install a Firefox plug-in, then we really, really, really need you to do something special.  Specifically, we'd love for you to install the "FireBug" plugin from this link into your Firefox browser.  Once it is installed, please watch the start of this video to see how to turn FireBug on and off, then skip to the video's 5:50 mark to see how to use the "Net" panel (you don't need the other features of Firebug).  We then need you to visit StockCharts.com with the FireBug "Net" panel open and surf around until you experience the extreme slowness.  We then need you to send us a screenshot of that "Net" panel area so we can see what caused the slowness.  (Please email the screenshot to support@stockcharts.com)

Note: FireBug is not for the faint of heart - it is a powerful developer plugin that can cause big problems if not used carefully.  Please only try this if you are confident in your computer skills.

Thanks in advance to everyone that spends time helping us track down this difficult issue.  Myself, the support team here and the StockCharts community at large really appreciate it.

- Chip