[LINK] Sensis media adserving

[Richard Chirgwin]

Linkers,

I have mentioned before that I increasingly encounter sites that end up 
hung during loading, while they wait for distant ad servers that have 
nothing at all to do with the content I'm trying to view. I think it 
must be a combination of factors including the iiNet connection (because 
some sites that are flaky at home are okay at the office, on the same 
machine).

But I thought I'd try and use Link to get a handle on what can possibly 
be causing the problem.

So: I started with trying to follow the Link posted by Kim Holburn - 
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13613/1090/1/1/ - and got the page 
hanging mid-load while it waited for the Sensis ad server. The same 
thing happened on Firefox and Safari, and (of course) turning of Java 
and Javascript brought the page up okay, but for the moment I'd like to 
leave aside the debate about what users should switch on / off.

Instead, I'm interested in these questions:

a) What aspects of Website design cause an entire page to "hang" while 
loading, when it's only one page element (the advertisement) that's the 
problem? and
b) What aspects of network behaviour mean that the same "source" 
advertiser server (Sensis Mediasmart) will fail to load to an iiNet 
connection but work on a Macquarie connection (at the office)?

Cheers,
RC