(tagging with SRE & TimedMediaHandler as an initial triage, feel free to retag as appropriate!)

I doubt either of those is related. If you look in the cogwheel, which resolution are you playing ?

We dont have adaptive bitrate, so if your connection or device cannot keep up, you might have to manually selct a lower resolution.

Videos used to start quickly and to load quickly. Since a short while they aren't anymore. Maybe I should ask on a Commons board whether other users also have this problem or if it's something about my connection if you don't have this issue and it's not clear that some/many other users have this too. My connection speed is fast enough and I can load YouTube videos for example very quickly. To answer your question, in the cogwheel of videos, the resolution is set to HD 720p.

• Right now the load quickly again but the whole day it was slow and it was often like the past days. I'll update this with info on which call takes long to load. This variability is also quite strange, it's not slow all the time.
• I also did an Internet speed test and it was as fast as it should be and again other sites like YouTube videos load quickly. Today and I think for shorter times a few times the past days loading images or even just Wikimedia sites was quite slow too.
• I'll briefly ask if somebody else is also having similar issues.
• I'm using a VPN and because of Wikimedia's super annoying bans of VPN IPs, I had to configure routes so Wikimedia sites are exempt (no other site needs this). I was wondering whether it's an issue with how I configured the routes. Recently, I think I had to reconnect sometimes to make things load but then other times things run smoothly for days or at least many hours. Guidance on how to sign up or contribute to Wikimedia sites without having to give up privacy (in the modern world Internet privacy which requires a VPN) would be great like info on how to configure these routes or allow VPN IPs for registered users. For example, I had to ping various sites to know which IPs to exempt. This worked fine for years - these problems only started relatively recently.

In T405760#11231516, @Prototyperspective wrote:

• I also did an Internet speed test and it was as fast as it should be and again other sites like YouTube videos load quickly. Today and I think for shorter times a few times the past days loading images or even just Wikimedia sites was quite slow too.

An internet speed test only works for 'normal' functioning internet. The problem is that it only targets the specific destination, whereas speed actually differs for every single website. Its generally fine to get the 'upper bound' of your speed. but doesn't saying anything useful about slowness of other websites. It might very well that the link between your provider and another country, before that country got to Wikimedia, had an issue over those days, and there is generally little wikimedia can do about that.

I'm using a VPN

Well... that adds a whole additional layer of issues that could be the problem here.

Guidance on how to sign up or contribute to Wikimedia sites without having to give up privacy (in the modern world Internet privacy which requires a VPN) would be great like info on how to configure these routes or allow VPN IPs for registered users.

Just a note that VPNs do not provide privacy. They can MASK certain things, but you also inherently DISCLOSE information to the VPN provider.

Yes I know that's just the upper layer. Just mentioning this and the speed is much faster than what's needed to play Commons videos. Thanks for the elaborations nevertheless. As said, I'm not even using the VPN for Wikimedia and also other websites as well as the speed test are fast with the VPN. I know VPNs are not sufficient for privacy but I think they're required for it (and especially so for people that use laptops on the go) but that's going offtopic.

It may be a related problem that also since recently sometimes images do not load at all where I suspected the route to be falsely configured. But it works again without changing anything about the route that exempts Commons by just disconnecting and reconnecting to the Internet. I checked the Network tab in Firefox and for PNG images there it says in the Transferred column "NS_BINDING_ABORTED" for one row of the same file with a stop sign in the Status column that says "Blocked" when hovering over it and in the second row for the same file(!) it has "NS_ERROR_NET_TIMEOUT" after a while and when hovering over the Domain it says "The connection used to fetch this resource was not secure". Maybe I should create a separate issue for that.

Second edit: now it stopped loading images without any reconnect in between. It worked fine then didn't load some images of a page with many images (also one edit was not saved when it looked like it was saved) and now it doesn't load some images (this) and for some only the thumbnail (this) and some are loaded fine (this). When I load the page where it doesn't load the image and thumbnail there is this in the Network tab of the Firefox console and now rows display there when "Media" and "Images" are enabled:

GET
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Buffalo_Gals_2018_colorway.jpg/1280px-Buffalo_Gals_2018_colorway.jpg?20181104002722
[HTTP/2 503 X ms]

This page is using the deprecated ResourceLoader module "jquery.ui".
Please use Codex instead. startup.js:1319:11
GET
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Buffalo_Gals_2018_colorway.jpg/1280px-Buffalo_Gals_2018_colorway.jpg?20181104002722
[HTTP/2 503 X ms]

Error: View mediainfoview does not exist
    _getView ViewFactory.js:692
    getEntityView ViewFactory.js:219
    createEntityView wikibase.ui.entityViewInit.js:146
    mightThrow jQuery
jquery.js:3489:29

Looks like I'll have to create a separate issue.

Third edit: may be related to https://www.wikimediastatus.net/incidents/cll27hvs2wj5 and the issue described in the second edit probably is. Other than that probably issues with Firefox' DNS over HTTPS configuration. I'll see how this continues and create a new issue if this persists.

If we believe this is a networking issue I don't think Reader Growth Team can really do anything about it; this would be something you'd have to work out between SRE and the VPN provider.

I encounter no problems with Firefox 143.0.3 on macOS 15.7.1 on the given example pages.

Maybe I shouldn't have written that I also use a VPN. The site is exempt from the VPN. I'm not using a VPN for it. Because of the inappropriate bans of VPN IPs I couldn't even edit otherwise. All other sites like Youtube load just fine, it's just Commons (maybe also other Wikimedia projects) that load slowly. It often works perfectly fine but right now also images and even just any kind of Commons pages barely load, making it near-unusable. The site is broken now and it was working great without any issues for 3+ years.

@Prototyperspective Can you please post the output of the traceroute step in these instructions?

Yeah, that definitely sounds like a network problem, and needs to be resolved between SRE and your internet service provider.

Okay, thanks for identifying the responsible team and for the link to the instructions on how to report this. I'll create a separate security task as described in these instructions.

Oh you're on the right task! I just think we don't need to add Readers Growth Team to it. :D