I'm using Opera GX right now and whenever I try to open an image or video it just takes way too long to load.
Images loads about 5% per second depending on size while videos plays about 0.5 seconds before it gets loading stuck regardless of length, and keeping the video paused while it loads won't help either.

Now one thing I noticed is that if I use Edge everything loads instantly, and considering this is one of those rare cases I see Opera GX acting weird with e621 I'm not entirely sure if it's a network, browser or site issue...
I already tried disabling all my extensions and it didn't helped either.

It's the same thing if you try using it with private tabs?

Annoying suggestion but have you tried to clear the cache, download list and history? Maybe it's time for a fresh install of that browser...

notknow said:
It's the same thing if you try using it with private tabs?

Annoying suggestion but have you tried to clear the cache, download list and history? Maybe it's time for a fresh install of that browser...

funny... incognito mode actually worked
cleaning cache or site cookies didn't tho

really not sure what's wrong but I'll try to leave the fresh install as a last resource

EDIT: Disabling hardware acceleration seems to fix it but also makes other stuff have performance issues, such as my live wallpaper for new tab

Hello!

Got the exact same issue.

E621 is really slow. At first, its performance (for images) is perfectly fine, videos are still slow.
However, when I open multiple tabs to go through new images from, for example, the popular tab, loading starts to eventually slow to a crawl.
Then, even just loading a single image takes ages. This happens to me in both Firefox 132.0.1 (64-bit) and Chromium 130.0.6723.116.

Its as if e621 is rate limiting me.

It is most definitely not due to my Connection Speed, everything is fine on that end.

Disabling Hardware Acceleration is not an option, since the performance of every Website in turn slows to a crawl without it.

darn said:
Hello!

Got the exact same issue.

E621 is really slow. At first, its performance (for images) is perfectly fine, videos are still slow.
However, when I open multiple tabs to go through new images from, for example, the popular tab, loading starts to eventually slow to a crawl.
Then, even just loading a single image takes ages. This happens to me in both Firefox 132.0.1 (64-bit) and Chromium 130.0.6723.116.

Its as if e621 is rate limiting me.

It is most definitely not due to my Connection Speed, everything is fine on that end.

Disabling Hardware Acceleration is not an option, since the performance of every Website in turn slows to a crawl without it.

So I'm not the only one with this issue. Even Opera GX for mobile is slow to load videos.

A temporary fix I've found is to set video resolution to 480p, it lowers image quality but buffer loads faster.

Same thing here.
I always use incognito mode for e621, but I also tried another browser, just to be sure, but made no difference.

It takes like over a minute to download a 2 MB image.

Other sites and services work perfectly normal, so it's not my connection...

Yeah same thing here. Using Microsoft Edge in-private mode. Been using it for years without any problems. Does the same thing on my phone web browser too.

Same issues on Chrome here. If needing more details lmk where to look.

Same thing is happening to me, except atm /no/ images or video whatsoever are loading. Text works fine. Possibly some server issues?

using incognito mode or other browsers worked for a while but not anymore at least on my end

so far the best temp fix I could find is to change image and video resolution to the lowest quality possible (videos still get stuck while buffer loads in some cases but not as frequent as when it plays at default quality)

It's a long shot but are you guys using some DNS? If not, maybe try the cloud flare one (1.1.1.1 - 1.0.0.1)?

notknow said:
It's a long shot but are you guys using some DNS? If not, maybe try the cloud flare one (1.1.1.1 - 1.0.0.1)?

also didn't worked

https://i.makeagif.com/media/8-03-2022/UqdJif.gif

it's getting worse everyday...
seriously wtf is happening?

berk_rider said:
it's getting worse everyday...
seriously wtf is happening?

I know, right? I was even being more careful to avoid rate-limiting, being more slow and patient as I browsed and favourited. I thought that had been my issue as it seemed to work, but now the site is back to being nigh unusable.

All I know is that I don't blame e621 for slowness. I blame the crappy free wifi I was given by moving here, and I'm too cheap to get my own.

cow_of_fire said:
All I know is that I don't blame e621 for slowness. I blame the crappy free wifi I was given by moving here, and I'm too cheap to get my own.

I'm connected directly to my router via cable and it still slow
even if I use other wifi, cell net or other PC it's still taking forever

berk_rider said:
I'm connected directly to my router via cable and it still slow
even if I use other wifi, cell net or other PC it's still taking forever

The reasoning: E621 is like an elastic bag. The more you put in, the larger and heavier the bag becomes to carry to the point where you will have to drag it behind you…

Getting around 150-400kbs at night on this and a lot of other sites. Not the websites fault as I get full speed when using a Vpn.
Shitty Canadian, Cipherkey-based isp wont look into it. They only care if speedtest.net and/or Youtube are affected.

flappyfox4000 said:
Getting around 150-400kbs at night on this and a lot of other sites. Not the websites fault as I get full speed when using a Vpn.
Shitty Canadian, Cipherkey-based isp wont look into it. They only care if speedtest.net and/or Youtube are affected.

usually vpn intensifies lag

for a second I thought my net support actually had it fixed... but yeah it still slow

I'm using Firefox and have been seeing this slow loading for a few months. Mobile is worst, never able to watch animations.

bicorn said:
Mobile is worst, never able to watch animations.

Is your software up to date?

I've found a temporary fix that so far it's working for me, it lowers quality but at least videos and images loads slightly faster

I assume everyone here's using the default "fit horizontal" width for both videos and images, which is quite big depending on your monitor resolution, so click on "account" tab, go to "settings" and scroll down until you find "default image width", then select "sample (850px)"
this will cap resolution for images at 850px and videos at 720p, making it load faster
video resolution can be further lowered to 480p if you manually select it under the video you're watching, but you'll have to do this every time you watch a video that has this resolution available

hope this helps... and also hope there's an admin reading this, for goodness sake fix your own website

Everything's working fine for me; I think it's your internet provider engaging in selective throttling. (This is what happens when you don't have net neutrality, kids.)

I ve been having the same problem over the past few weeks. I m using firefox on mobile. It s probably not due to my connection because other websites work fine for me. Could it be e621 rate limiting?

abecedeef said:
I ve been having the same problem over the past few weeks. I m using firefox on mobile. It s probably not due to my connection because other websites work fine for me. Could it be e621 rate limiting?

most likely
there are times that my browser works just fine for a few minutes, then it starts to act like a turtle shortly after
I've already tried contacting my internet support and they confirmed that my connection is working just fine, also tried to disable all my extentions, use other browsers, going incognito, setting up a dns... some of those attempts actually worked for a few moments but then it started lagging again

maybe it didn't affected all users but I'm pretty sure it's something with e621, and as you said other websites are working just fine
rule34.xxx is basically a cheap version of e621 and it's working perfectly fine

same issue here, site is taking way longer to load then it used to. my first thought was isp throttling but unless everyone here has the same isp (or everyone's isp here is doing the same) then I have no clue.

Yeah, no, I'm seeing issues here. I know ATF got DDoSed and there was that attack by the manchild a while back, could be a really, really shitty DDoS attempt?

Running terribly.

Same for me, but it's been getting sort of better

Works fine for me, and I've never had a single problem. I'm probably on the other side of the world compared to you all too.

FlappyFox4000 saying that using a VPN solves the issue for them really leads me to believe that it's selective throttling at the ISP level, at least in their case. Considering the tens of thousands of unique daily users e621 gets, there would be a lot more people complaining if this issue was widespread.

Yep, I'm having issues too. Not located in NA or Europe either, so I'd be a little surprised if I share an ISP with other people experiencing slowdowns.

I'm in NA, and not experiencing any issues with load times.

Using a VPN increases my loading speeds.

also having slow down issues and only on e621, im not having this issue on any other site

Throwing my hat into the ring on the strange slowdowns. Also seems to be fine if I use a VPN. No issues with trace route testing and ping testing. Possibly an issue on the return. I've tried testing VPN in Dallas, Seattle, and New York City. All good on speeds using the site. Only other relevant info I can throw is i'm on Spectrum for internet.

Also having long loading times in regards to the site, to the point where images will seemingly time out on loading. Results pages will also fail to load image previews. I'm on Spectrum internet.

berk_rider said:
I'm using Opera GX right now and whenever I try to open an image or video…

Same issue, DuckDuckGo Mobile and Desktop Browser. Closing e6 tabs seems to help.

I've been seeing slow download speeds for a while, around 100-500KB/s on Firefox for Windows and Opera for Android. I tried downloading something on my phone over Verizon 5G, and even with a weak signal I got about 3.5MB/s. My ISP is Spectrum too. Weird.

Probably just e621 being slow tonight, give it some time.

solluna said:
Probably just e621 being slow tonight, give it some time.

It's been like this for months for me, on and off, not just tonight/recently. Even just the thumbnails in the popular tab sometimes take legitimately 5 minutes to load.

solluna said:
Probably just e621 being slow tonight, give it some time.

this has been going on for users in this thread for over 20 days so not really a "slow night" lol
---------

i'm having no issues myself currently, on mobile or pc.

For me it's a recent "as of this week" thing. Firefox, Linux, via both native Telenor connection and filtered through Proton. Webm files might as well not exist at the moment, and images are loading at a nostalgiac dialup rate. E6 seems to be the only site afflicted, or I'd chalk it up to ISP fuckery.

votp said:
For me it's a recent "as of this week" thing. Firefox, Linux, via both native Telenor connection and filtered through Proton. Webm files might as well not exist at the moment, and images are loading at a nostalgiac dialup rate. E6 seems to be the only site afflicted, or I'd chalk it up to ISP fuckery.

Pretty much the same song and dance on my end using my own city's ISP. I only usually ever have like three tabs open and only e621 is the slow boy, including all the things you mentioned. Rebooting my network fixes it for a bit, but eventually it slows down.

Same here both on Firefox and Chrome mobile using a small local ISP (Hey-Com) here in Germany. Every other site loads perfectly fine.
Thumbnails can take up to a minute to even start loading and can then take up to a minute to finish loading. Same with images even in the lowest quality.
For videos it is actually faster for me to download them if they are more than 3-5 seconds as just loading them to start playing them takes very long if it ever happens.
Issue has started since there are four thumbnails per row in mobile mode here on the site.

Glad to see I'm not alone in this, if not sad for the situation. I thought it was my internet being slow but other sites have been fine. Both desktop and mobile. I tested to see if my mobile data would make it better and it does work fine with that. But wifi connection has fast up and downloads. So it's either my ISP throttling the site for some reason or something with the site itself.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I use chrome on both desktop and mobile.

Having issues here as well on Brave browser. Everything is loading slowly and videos barely play.

berk_rider said:
I've found a temporary fix that so far it's working for me, it lowers quality but at least videos and images loads slightly faster

I assume everyone here's using the default "fit horizontal" width for both videos and images, which is quite big depending on your monitor resolution, so click on "account" tab, go to "settings" and scroll down until you find "default image width", then select "sample (850px)"
this will cap resolution for images at 850px and videos at 720p, making it load faster
video resolution can be further lowered to 480p if you manually select it under the video you're watching, but you'll have to do this every time you watch a video that has this resolution available

hope this helps... and also hope there's an admin reading this, for goodness sake fix your own website

This helped a little but the site is still slow, even the text color isn't loading right away.

Coming back to this to say the site returned to loading quickly like it always had a few days ago for a few hours then returned to being slow much like everyone else is reporting.

This is odd behaviour and I cannot really think of a good reason on my end why.

I've been having the same problem in Firefox (images and video taking forever to load), but in a private window the images load up just fine.

fauxgirl said:
I've been having the same problem in Firefox (images and video taking forever to load), but in a private window the images load up just fine.

That worked for about 5 minutes. The site is now really slow again, even in private.

berk_rider said:
I'm using Opera GX right now and whenever I try to open an image or video it just takes way too long to load.
Images loads about 5% per second depending on size while videos plays about 0.5 seconds before it gets loading stuck regardless of length, and keeping the video paused while it loads won't help either.

Now one thing I noticed is that if I use Edge everything loads instantly, and considering this is one of those rare cases I see Opera GX acting weird with e621 I'm not entirely sure if it's a network, browser or site issue...
I already tried disabling all my extensions and it didn't helped either.

I am also noticing this as an issue. I am using firefox.

Having same issues on Firefox.

Tried disabling Ipv6, setting DNS to cloudflare, rebooting router, pc, etc.

No avail.

Images are loading like ive traveled back in time to the 90's.

Incredibly slow downloads for me lately (past few weeks), around 1-2mbps it looks like. Brave, re621, same sluggish downloads on both my Windows desktop and my Linux laptops. Midwest USA

Firefox and Chrome (latest version), US east coast, Spectrum ISP. Issue appears to be with e621; sites like e6ai, FA, rule 34xxx, etc., all load fine. I opened Vivaldi for the first time in months, and images load normally (very quickly) on that browser. Even loaded up ancient version Pale moon (v28) and that seems to work pretty well. Wonder if some sort of caching issue or sudden compatibility with latest version of Chrome and Opera?

OK, it just started happening to me now too. At first I thought maybe I had been getting lucky earlier and only loading small images, but then I remembered that just a few hours ago I was watching a video and everything was fine, now that same video has to pause to buffer.

Guess I'm not alone either since I've been noticing some slowness myself for the past few weeks. I had initially chalked it up to playing around with my router and getting my new NAS setup, but everything else works fine save for e6.

Midwest US, Spectrum: 500up/300down, Brave (chromium, latest version). Based on all these reports, I won't bother with the finer troubleshooting like cache clearing until a staff member advises on the sites issues, if there are any. At least its not a total outage.

Same issue across different browsers I use. It’s reached a point where I just go to Rule 34 for my routine. The site is definitely slower for loading images this month.

Same issue here. Latest Firefox, Spectrum internet, just like most of us here. Definitely seems like it could be a Spectrum thing (which checks out, they're an awful ISP through and through)

p-a-t-a-r said:
Same issue here. Latest Firefox, Spectrum internet, just like most of us here. Definitely seems like it could be a Spectrum thing (which checks out, they're an awful ISP through and through)

I've got my city's ISP, which uses their own brand of hardware, so it's not entirely Spectrum's doing.

Are there any North American ISPs that aren't awful?

Site has also been running super slow for me the past couple days, not unusably slow but at first I thought it was just an issue with my phone

errorist said:
Are there any North American ISPs that aren't awful?

None of the big national ones are good tbh, but there are some municipal fiber providers out there that don't suck if you're lucky enough to live in their service area.

It's been like this for over a week but I feel like it's getting worse. The site is almost unusable at this point

site's slow for me too, was wondering maybe it was because i made my account not long after the big recent ban wave?

I'm a EU user, with a relatively fast and quite stable connection and I can definitely say that I'm also having massive issues lately. From what I can tell, my ISP also isn't really filtering or blocking anything, at least on residential connections.
So I don't really think it has something to do with the ISP's.

I initially assumed it might be the RE621 userscript I installed recently, thinking it would somehow trigger the rate limit, but it kept persisting even when not using the site for a while. And since there is more people having this issue and I also recon that probably not everybody has RE621 installed, I don't think it's that either.

I do think I'm remembering the issues starting close to when an announcement about the recent ban wave was made though, so maybe it has something to do with that, but that might genuinely also be me misremembering things.

The Site only loads slow when signed in for me, I use Chrome and also tried Opera, and when signed in to my e621 account, it loads content very slow, but signing out of my account on either browser makes things load instantly. Anyone else experiencing it this way?

furrealfurry said:
The Site only loads slow when signed in for me, I use Chrome and also tried Opera, and when signed in to my e621 account, it loads content very slow, but signing out of my account on either browser makes things load instantly. Anyone else experiencing it this way?

that's most likelly because your acc has an option enabled for forcing all images and videos to fit horizontal with your screen
when you're not signed the option go back to normal and everything has its resolution reduced (images 850px and videos 720p) which causes the image to load faster in exchange for quality loss

I don't know if country and continents has anything to do with that but I'm speaking from brazil, I've called my ISP support and they'll send someone on monday to check if my connection is the reason of the issue or not
funny is that if I use my wifi or cable connection the site works slower, but if I connect my cell mobile data everything works just fine... that's why I'm not entirely sure if the problem is the site or my connection

The site seems to be working fine for me at the moment. Weird.
I m from europe if that matters.

Been having the issue for a few weeks in the MWUS with Spectrum. Trying to view a webm is like watching youtube over dialup.
Firefox, Edge, Chrome, & Tor made little difference. Site latency and packet loss are excellent, as well as my internet speed.

I've been experiencing this for the past few days too, but only on home internet, not mobile data or hotspot. The only recent exception was yesterday when everything was working fine. Looks like the issue depends on the internet provider.

It happens with all images and video from static1.e621.net. Everything works fine on the sfw site (static1.e926.net), even when loading the same image.

Seems to be intermittent. Last few days I noticed it, images and videos would take multiple minutes to load. Tonight, they loaded in just a couple seconds.

I'm probably gonna blame it internally on the ol' ISP since they're no stranger to bad decisions, though it could be a number of things.