I've noticed that recently Skritter.cn is being slow every now and then, and while studying I have to wait a long time between groups of characters to be loaded.

I know its not my internet connection, sites like TaoBao load speedily when Skritter is struggling.

Could you please verify your webcomponents are not influenced by the Great Firewall?

My location: Beijing

Thanks!

Unfortunately, skritter.cn does have to go all the way to the Google App Engine servers in the US, unlike Chinese sites such as Taobao. Our mirror is just set up to avoid the GFW blanket App Engine ban, but there are still plenty of things that can cause slowdowns, both from the distance the packets must travel, and from the inspection they must suffer at the Chinese border.

I have a couple of kind of related questions...
-Will connecting from China make a difference when syncing on the app?
-And is there any way to predict whether the GFW will affect things like Gmail/Hotmail etc? Last time I was in China it was pretty much a lottery!

@Catherine
Hotmail is usually fine, gmail on the other hand is quite shaky because of some issues between Google and the Chinese gov. It's constantly going up and down, no way to predict stability. As well as many other google services, even the search engine of google.com.hk.

Then there are the general annoyances with visiting Western websites in China, at any time it can be very slow. What I find most annoying is that I'm basically incapable of watching videos on news sites like CNN BBC or NOS.nl without buffering triple the time of the video, as well as all Western live streaming sport and news sites basically never working smoothly, except after 11pm.... maybe!

And I have a 4mbps Internet connection, it's fine as videos and movie streaming from Chinese sites are always running smoothly. I know that most Western sites have there servers far from China but in all countries surrounding China these sites run ten times faster, with the exception of North Korea. I can only speculate as to why they decide to slow down so mny foreign websites. Rant finished!

There are quite some Western run online programs that have servers in HK or Taiwan. Would that be an option?

We tried that, but the speed/accessibility of the server in HK wasn't any better, and so far (totally non-scientifically) appears to have been worse than simply using the same server www.skritter.com goes through.