The first load of the session

When the browser starts it has no established paths and no recent knowledge of the network. Before anything you asked for can happen, it has to get its bearings, and that setup work lands entirely on whatever you asked for first.

Everything afterwards benefits from that work. The second address you open feels quicker not because it is a better address but because the expensive part already happened.

People judge an address by their first attempt on it. The first attempt is the one carrying the setup cost, so the address that happens to be first gets blamed for a delay that belonged to the session.

This produces stable and completely false beliefs. Somebody decides one of the published addresses is the slow one, uses it first every time out of habit, and confirms the belief on every occasion. The distance tiles on this panel are there as a reminder that the three strings have no relationship to each other beyond a shared opening, and nothing about a string makes it slow.

On a first load, waiting is usually the correct action, and it is the action people take least. The common alternative is to reload repeatedly, which throws away partial progress and starts again, so a page that would have appeared takes several times as long or never settles at all.

Give the first attempt a genuinely long time before doing anything. Longer than feels reasonable. If it has not resolved after that, the useful next step is to try a different address from the set rather than to hammer the same one, because that at least changes something.

1. Open the browser and let it settle before asking for anything.
2. Open one address and wait properly.
3. If nothing happens, try another address from the set rather than reloading the first.
4. If none of them resolves, the problem is more likely to be your side of the path than all three destinations at once.
5. Stop and come back later rather than repeating the cycle. Repetition is the least productive part of this list.

It cannot tell you whether any address is currently reachable. It does not probe, it holds no history, and it shows no status of any kind. If you want the reason stated flatly, it is that a claim about reachability would be a claim this site has no means to make.

It also cannot tell you how long a first load takes, because that would require timing one, which is a measurement this site does not perform. Everything above is a description of behaviour, not a set of figures.

The tiles on this panel count characters and compare the three published addresses to one another. That is all the data available, and it is at least relevant: the reason to try a second address is that the three are genuinely different strings pointing at different places, not variations on one another.

The pair distance bars make that concrete. Beyond the shared opening the three have nothing in common, so trying a second one after the first fails is a real change of approach rather than a repetition dressed up as a new attempt.

How long should I wait before giving up?

Longer than you want to. This board will not put a number on it, because it has not measured one and a made up figure would be worse than none.

Does reloading help?

Rarely. It discards progress and starts again, which is why a page that was nearly there can be kept permanently nearly there by an impatient reader.