Google websites not loading in Chrome

[smurfomatic]

We have a frustrating/confusing issue with Chrome not loading (or taking an age to load) Google domain sites, including Gmail, Google Drive etc. Loading other websites on Chrome is fine.

 

This does not seem to be a problem using IE or Firefox on the same computers, so seems to be a browser issue.

 

We're using Smoothwall but I've whitelisted all the Google domains I can find.

 

Any suggestions?

[6Foot2]

We didn't see this today. Is it the same for all of your users, or can you limit it to a room/number of rooms/room(s) supplied by a particular switch?

 

Looking for an identifiable pattern (if there is one)

[smurfomatic]

Seems to be all users, certainly not isolated to any one part of the premises. It's an intermittent thing, sometimes (for example) the Drive page will load in a few seconds, others it'll hang with the circle of death for well over a minute.

[smurfomatic]

Still experiencing this issue. Thought it might be because Smoothwall was showing slow response to DNS requests so restarted DNS service on the server, got the green light in "functionality tests" but Google sites still lagging massively. Even tried temporarily turning off all the Smoothwall web filter, HTTPS inspection, content modification & anti malware to see if that's the cause but still horribly slow.

 

Throughout all of this IE still seems to be working at "normal" speed, I'm at a loss to understand what it is. Something must be behind it!

[Arthur]

Something must be behind it!

Are you using Chrome v69?

 

www.digitaltrends.com/computing/chrome-69-user-issues/

 

Though not an exhaustive list of user-reported problems, we’ve read user reports indicating that Chrome downloads SWF files instead of playing them, notification blocking doesn’t work, problems exist with lags when scrolling with touchscreens, websites won’t load, and there are sync issues, crashes and freezes, problems with logging in, displaying of the wrong language, inability to save passwords, and crashing when opening bookmarks or tabs.

[smurfomatic]

Thanks arthur, trying out something suggested elsewhere by disabling QUIC and seems to be working better. It has only happened since we came back from the holidays, so I expect that's when v69 was installed on all the computers here.