Can't resolve jquery.com on Virgin Media

[chris523586]

Good morning,

For the past 24 hours, I have been unable to resolve jquery.com from my Virgin home broadband connection. This issue is apparent on mobiles using WiFi in the house, two computers etc.

As a consequence, there are a number of web sites that I can't access.

Does anyone have any ideas as to where the fault may be? jquery.com or Virgin?

Chris

 

[Lucian]

Jquery.com seems fine, usually whenever another party and Virgin are involved, my knee jerk reaction is to always blame Virgin, hehe.

intoDNS: jquery.com - check DNS server and mail server health

intoDNS: Checking health and configurtion of DNS server and mail server for domainjquery.com.

intodns.com

That said, developers lazily relying on third parties to host javascript critical to the website being functional is the bigger problem here, especially when said files are barely a few kB in size.

 

[Msh]

That said, developers lazily relying on third parties to host javascript critical to the website being functional is the bigger problem here

It's not laziness and expecting a Cloudflare-based CDN to be reliable (as, if not, more reliable than your own) is a perfectly reasonable position to take.

Does anyone have any ideas as to where the fault may be? jquery.com or Virgin?

Probably Virgin here, yes. We had some of our team complain about the same issue (all VM users).

 

[Lucian]

It's not laziness and expecting a Cloudflare-based CDN to be reliable (as, if not, more reliable than your own) is a perfectly reasonable position to take.

Sorry for going offtopic, but I think it's a silly practice because you expose yourself to this kind of issues and for what?
What is the reason to do it? I see only downsides.

 

[Msh]

Sorry for going offtopic, but I think it's a silly practice because you expose yourself to this kind of issues and for what?
What is the reason to do it? I see only downsides.

The size of the content is less of a concern nowadays but that was the initial intention behind it. Still, avoiding unnecessary calls is always going to be a performance win, you can't assume your user has the best connection and all these little things generally help. When the user still needs to make a request, why not try to make that as efficient as possible?

"This kind of issue" = Virgin having problems with Cloudflare, should we all stop using CDNs in general then to avoid that extra flakiness because of Virgin Media?

I get your point and it's probably less relevant now than ever. But to say it's down to our laziness is simply not the case.

 

[mikeliuk]

Good morning,

For the past 24 hours, I have been unable to resolve jquery.com from my Virgin home broadband connection. This issue is apparent on mobiles using WiFi in the house, two computers etc.

As a consequence, there are a number of web sites that I can't access.

Does anyone have any ideas as to where the fault may be? jquery.com or Virgin?

Chris

Does the domain name resolve? Can you route to the addresses?

 

[omvm12]

I'm having the same issue since yesterday. All browsers cannot load jquery while on VM, I have tried tethering from my phone connection and there is no issue when doing that. Tried all reasonable local troubleshooting and tried using cloudflare and google DNS servers but the issue persists across all browsers. Essentially, any jquery .js resource won't load on VM, breaking multiple websites, in chrome's console the jquery JS file will eventually show as CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

edit : just to add that the jquery resources so far are all hosted on jquery.com I've not found a site to test who hosts their own jquery resources

 

[AtRealOshawaConnection]

Can you imagine relying on a CDN for a tiny, single file that runs your whole site? Unless you are running a really busy site hosted in New Zealand or something, where is the actual benefit?

It's not laziness and expecting a Cloudflare-based CDN to be reliable (as, if not, more reliable than your own) is a perfectly reasonable position to take.


Probably Virgin here, yes. We had some of our team complain about the same issue (all VM users).

Sorry for going offtopic, but I think it's a silly practice because you expose yourself to this kind of issues and for what?
What is the reason to do it? I see only downsides.

Lucian the real MVP.

 

[WKDRED]

Jquery.com seems fine, usually whenever another party and Virgin are involved, my knee jerk reaction is to always blame Virgin, hehe.

intoDNS: jquery.com - check DNS server and mail server health

intoDNS: Checking health and configurtion of DNS server and mail server for domainjquery.com.

intodns.com

That said, developers lazily relying on third parties to host javascript critical to the website being functional is the bigger problem here, especially when said files are barely a few kB in size.

Yep I hate this practice.

 

[WKDRED]

The size of the content is less of a concern nowadays but that was the initial intention behind it. Still, avoiding unnecessary calls is always going to be a performance win, you can't assume your user has the best connection and all these little things generally help. When the user still needs to make a request, why not try to make that as efficient as possible?

"This kind of issue" = Virgin having problems with Cloudflare, should we all stop using CDNs in general then to avoid that extra flakiness because of Virgin Media?

I get your point and it's probably less relevant now than ever. But to say it's down to our laziness is simply not the case.

I can offer my insight as someone who has analysed performance on accessing web pages and from the web server side of it as well.

There is a lot of outdated information on the internet where e.g. it states its beneficial to deliberately host different parts of your site on different domain names to overcome the http connection limit in browsers (and on web servers), however modern HTTP protocol allows chaining requests in a single session, and adding extra sources to the web page requires extra DNS lookups on top of having to establish new connections to servers, all of which slows things down.

Also i would be uneasy hosting javascript code on a server I dont control. Personally I think there is a security issue on that.

But ultimately whilst your point about cloudflare is valid, it doesnt make much sense to just use it for one javascript file and not the rest of the website, if your main host goes down then using cloudflare for reliability on that one file becomes moot, so the benefit would then be realised by sticking the entire site on cloudflare, probably using their proxy service.

But this does seem the modern way of doing things, remote fonts etc. Perhaps I am out of touch on this as I know this practice is becoming more and more common, it just never made sense to me personally.

 

[Msh]

however modern HTTP protocol allows chaining requests in a single session, and adding extra sources to the web page requires extra DNS lookups on top of having to establish new connections to servers, all of which slows things down.

That's fair, but also only one side of this. In the event that you need the file, in a large number of cases, your browser simply won't bother as it already holds it in local caches.

Also i would be uneasy hosting javascript code on a server I dont control. Personally I think there is a security issue on that.

You can instruct your browser to validate the checksum and keep in mind that in a large number of cases the developer also doesn't have control of the server they place stuff onto regardless.
Sure there's a security risk but it's trivial to mitigate.

it doesnt make much sense to just use it for one javascript file and not the rest of the website

Again back to the first part of the reply. It may result in you not needing to fetch anything.

But this does seem the modern way of doing things, remote fonts etc. Perhaps I am out of touch on this as I know this practice is becoming more and more common, it just never made sense to me personally.

Fonts generally happen for licensing reasons, more than technical ones.

Edit: One extra point quickly. I am not saying people should or should not do this. I am saying it's unfair to call a developer lazy for making this decision.
Ultimately the problem's with Virgin Media here, not the developers.

 

[Lucian]

@Msh I apologise for the wording, perhaps "lazy" is not the best term and I was certainly not pointing a finger at you.

I think most developers go with the flow and somehow using these libraries from 3rd parties has become entrenched.

Times have moved on and imho this is no longer how you get the best performance and you also leak visitor data to jquery.com (or whoemever).

The caching aspect no longer applies since browsers in the past few years have mitigated cross-site resource caching (indeed due to privacy and security concerns).

In fact, you introduce latency/delays by linking to 3rd parties, as Cloudflare - who is hosting/proxying your site could have just sent the js file in the same TCP stream (assuming http2 is in use) as the rest of the site.

Cloudflare also compress the contents, so I had a look at jquery-3.6.0.min.js, it's 88K uncompressed, but 32K compressed with gzip, so we could say the bandwidth savings are in most cases irrelevant.

Not a web developer, so I'm probably missing some details/context, but as someone running web servers for a long time, I would encourage everyone to host everything in the same place and not link to 3rd parties at all.

 

[Lucian]

But this does seem the modern way of doing things, remote fonts etc. Perhaps I am out of touch on this as I know this practice is becoming more and more common, it just never made sense to me personally.

One of my biggest beefs with current dev trends and "remote fonts" is when a site doesn't fail gracefully when remote fonts fail to load, many sites just look real bad and almost unusable.

 

[Msh]

@Msh I apologise for the wording, perhaps "lazy" is not the best term and I was certainly not pointing a finger at you.

Well I am lazy

The caching aspect no longer applies since browsers in the past few years have mitigated cross-site resource caching (indeed due to privacy and security concerns).

TIL, ignore everything I have said

fwiw, one of the main reasons I left VM was because of the issues with Cloudflare. Try downloading/uploading massive objects every day with 10% packet loss, it's not fun...

 

[omvm12]

Any ideas on how to work around this (aside from a vpn) / get in touch with someone at virgin that won't make me waste time doing all the basic and not so basic troubleshooting I've already done and will actually pass it to someone to get fixed? Could it potentially be an issue on jquery's server denying requests from VM and worth contacting them?

 

[Lucian]

@omvm12 You could use the /etc/hosts trick to force resolve code.jquery.com to a specific IP, ie with an entry such as this:

69.16.175.42 code.jquery.com

 

[Msh]

Do we know if it's just the resolution that's failing, or is it the connection?

 

[omvm12]

Do we know if it's just the resolution that's failing, or is it the connection?

happy to check, how can we find that out?

 

[omvm12]

@omvm12 You could use the /etc/hosts trick to force resolve code.jquery.com to a specific IP, ie with an entry such as this:

69.16.175.42 code.jquery.com

thanks if VM fail to sort it I will try this

 

[omvm12]

Virgin have acknowledged they're looking in to it here : https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Networking-and-WiFi/Highwinds-CDN-Issues/td-p/5316809/page/2