I am not sure other people have noticed this or not but during the morning times, the LinkedIn servers get bogged down and the website ends up looking like this
I know of a few people that this happens to and figure that this is not a “user” problem. The issue is really with the servers where LinkedIn stores its CSS. The main page www.linkedin.com uses the following style sheet residing at http://static.linkedin.com/scds/concat/leo/build-466_11_1786-prod/css?f=css%2Freset&f=lib%2Fyui%2F2.4.1%2Fcontainer%2Fassets%2Fcontainer&f=css%2Fdefault&f=css%2Fnavigation&f=css%2Fmodules&v=build-450_1_1641-prod.
It appears that this server goes down during “busy” times and renders the main page useless. The fact that it’s been going on for a while without visible improvements worries me..
This is such a consistent problem that it has rendered LinkedIn as mostly unusable for me. What’s most amazing to me is that this is a trivial matter to fix – they need to use a CDN properly – it’s not like there aren’t a lot of good choices out there for CDN’s. It’s sloppy, and I’m sure it’s part of the reason that LinkedIn is, was, and will be an also-ran in the social networking space.
We were teaching a job search group (Career Connections at Calvary) about using LinkedIn, and ran into problems with this. By opening the Activity window in Safari on a mac, I could see that this static.linkedin.com url was the item that did not load quickly and sometimes completely stalled (well, often). We had to cache the pages and then flip between them later instead of showing live linked in pages in a demo to accompany the slides. Overall network performance speed was 2.5Mbps both ways, which would have been find if the static page were responsive (though I’ve heard it is very large).
Here is a portion (after stripping out the args and %2F, etc) of the url to make it somewhat readable. Effectively, everything after the first token is an arg to that page:
static.linkedin.com concat leo yahoo-dom-event yahoo-dom-event datasource datasource-min connection connection-min autocomplete autocomplete-min animation animation-min linkedin-min controls ShowMore MarketingBubble PersonalNav global_navigation container container-min util-min engine-min engine_fix-min ajax ui_settings_service webtracking_service typeahead_service UISettingsService TypeAheadService WebTrackingService
I started debugging what was up with the network connection. Now I realize it is not my network connection, but rather these large auxiliary files for the page.
Thanks for your post. Let’s hope this gets fixed or at least improved.
Yep, same issue here – was really bad a few weeks ago, seems to have been better recently.
Yes – I’ve been having the same issue for a while now, seems to be getting worse if anything. I’ve sent them an email to see if there’s a fix coming out.