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The single pixel gif?
(continued)

What else can stand in the way?

In another situation, we found a page where two animated banners were present -- one top, and one bottom, and the animation caused the last two thirds of the page not to load at all. The single-pixels came in as generic graphic icons anyway, even with the graphics turned on. The browser continually attempted to download the page, while interleaving with the animation and went into an inescapable loop. Load/reload/reload/reload, and so forth. The red progress-bar never finished.
__ By 9 am, a site in Europe had become so busy that only about 20% of the page actually loaded before locking the browser. Another site refused to mount at all. Later in the day, around noon time, a revisit to the same sites, cache cleared, repeated the very same scenario. The US West Coast was just waking up to get their email, it was lunch time in the East, (highest traffic of the day) and Europe was already into the early evening glut. This time, because of the heavy load on the WEB, the results were much, much slower. Now that same 25 or so seconds had become 90 seconds. The repeating animation page now occupied the browser to within a few lines of the top, allowing only a few lines at a time to be written to the page between each loop.

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