
I'm pretty sure that the problem isn't just me, nor my computer. I have a very fast cable connection and I don't experience slowness on any of dozens of other sites that I visit daily. I've also seen this happen at work.
I've run tests using IE and Chrome on my 2Ghz Core2 Duo PC as well as in firefox, chrome and safari on my 3Ghz Core2 Duo iMac. In all browsers, I experience the same behavior to a large degree.
For example, when I go to the most recent 'Visiting Tg friends' topic in a freshly started IE browser on my PC, it takes about 70 seconds for the site to render. The whole time the CPU is pegged and memory balloons by 250M. The behavior is much worse in Chrome.
On my iMac, in safari it takes 34 seconds to render, the CPU is pegged and safari memory usage increases by over 600MB! Memory usage continues to increase even just sitting there. Firefox does better, but it still takes nearly 25 seconds, full pegged with a memory increase of about 250MB. In chrome 13.0.782.32 beta, the problem is the worst. Which is really unfortunate because it's my favorite browser. It's by far the fastest for all other browsing that I do.
I wonder if part of the problem is that most pages on TG load a very large number of items. Just the front page loads over 130 items from sites such as Facebook, twitter, youtube google, cloudfront, equantserve, linkedin, chartbeat, aweber, digg, etc etc. Often I can see the browser hanging on linkedin or Facebook. Although I doubt this would cause the high CPU usage.
Anyway, I'm hoping the TG site admins might take a look into this. Do they regularly try various browsers on different architectures? How do the forums work for everyone else?
-Tom