So, one lonely night I noticed that when using the Narwhal Reddit App with PLDT that any Redgifs content takes an incredibly long time to load. We’re talking 2-3 min minutes to load like a 10mb gif.
I did a bunch of testing by routing my iPhone traffic through my Macbook and checking the requests and found that…
- ✅ SSL handshake is quick — PLDT is not intercepting TLS or blocking Redgifs outright.
- ✅ DNS and connect times are fine — the routing to
api.redgifs.comstarts fast. - 🚨 The response trickles in at 466 B/s, which is unusable and indicates serious throttling or congestion after the handshake.
This strongly suggests that PLDT is either:
- Throttling traffic to
api.redgifs.com, OR - There is usual PLDT fuckery going on with their routing
If I compare this to Sky Cable, where this same request returns in under 1 second and I have no issues loading Redgifs.
As usual there is simply going to be no way to get this information in front of anyone at PLDT who has any understanding what this means, or how they can fix it at their service level, so I have made changes on my router to route all requests for…
- api.redgifs.com
- media.redgifs.com
- files.redgifs.com
- userpic.redgifs.com
…Via my secondary Sky Cable WAN which means that Redgifs content loads as expected 👍
The official Reddit App seems to cache RedGifs content into their v.redd.it CDN so this problem is only with Narwhal or accessing the Redgifs.com website directly.
This is an FYI for anyone wanting to get their “fix” from RedGifs and being frustrated with PLDT not loading the content in a timely manner 👊🍆💦