We are aware of the problem causing slowness of some pages to load. This is due to google ads.
DoubleClick for Publishers - Service Details
We're investigating reports of an issue with DoubleClick for Publishers. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access DoubleClick for Publishers, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.
Tracking signals are sometimes returning HTTP errors in Europe
Whilst this issue is still unresolved, I have spent the past few hours adapting code to ensure impact on the site is minimal.
There are several posts on google forums about this service disruption which is affecting UK websites.
LinkThere have been major problems with AdSense for 3-4 hours here in the UK (don’t know about elsewhere), intermittent 502 & 503 errors affecting various Google domains, preventing ads from loading, and when they do occasionally load they take a very, very, long time.
It’s not just DoubleClick, so far I’ve noticed that the following domains are affected:
pagead2.googlesyndication.com
googleads.g.doubleclick.net
adservice.google.co.uk
The symptoms resemble a DDOS attack, but with the resources that must be available to Google I’m guessing it’s more likely to be a major system fault, presumably only affecting Europe.
It's surprising that no-one on the forum mentioned this, but I guess it just goes to show how many people these days use ad-blockers and why for the past 3 months I've not received a single penny from google ads.
Please remember we are not profit-making and without any revenue from the small amount of income we do receive from advertising and donations then this site just cannot survive. Our server running costs do not come cheap