At home on 56k dial to Earthlink, Omaha, NE:   frequent intermittant delay of a minute or more in *retrieval* of pages from the Monastery.   It's not a local rendering problem because I can watch the external modem's RD/SD LEDs and see when the data is being received.   This occurs whether or not I block the banner ads with Junkbuster.

At work through Corporate MS proxy to T1 to AT&T, Omaha, NE:   frequent intermittant timeout error from proxy.

Whether at home or at work, the problem is not episodic.   In other words, there doesn't appear to be times when it's "broken" and times when it's "working".   At any given time roughly 1/2 of the page loads happen quickly and 1/2 are sloooow.   Is not browser-dependant for me - same with Mozilla (Linux) and IE or Opera (Win2k).

However, framechat at home works fine, but IIRC, it works from XML feeds, not the regular HTML pages.

Of these possible problem points, my direct observations would seem to rule out local browser and banner ads as contributing to the problem.   Reports in this thread from fellow monks who *aren't* experiencing the severe lag would seem to rule out PM host (hw | sw | webserver | E2 | bandwidth), leaving Internet connectivity problems as a strong candidate.   Except that I don't see why page retrieval would be slow and XML feed not be.

• PM host hw
• PM host OS
• PM webserver
• PM E2
• PM bandwidth
• Banner ad hosting
• Internet connectivity at-large
• local browser

Anyone else have information that might help track down and hopefully resolve this problem?
    cheers,
    Don
    striving toward Perl Adept
    (it's pronounced "why-bick")

Update:
I tried 1000 byte pings to PM and got consistant quick responses while I was experiencing intermittant slow PM page loads.   That and a CB comment by good monk tye led me to this apparant solution to the problem.