Samuel,
Seems like after a few days of normal operation the site has once again slowed down to a crawl, text story retrieval stalls or doesn’t display, email sharing takes multiple attempts to “send”.
Doesn’t seem to be time (or load) dependent as daytime and middle of the night it is the same thing.
Need a permanent fix for this as it is really getting annoying at this point.
Mike
It’s probably one of your extensions. What do you have installed? Do you have Adblock installed?
Plenty of extensions loaded (including AdBlock) but that would not account for the on-again off-again nature of the slowdowns. Seems fine for a few days and then slows down for a few. Have tried an extension-less browser, cleared caches, tested my internet connection, defragged and restarted numerous times during the slowdowns and it changes nothing.I have also tried from another computer with a different set of extentions, and with none. When NewsBlur is slower it is consistently slower regardless of these factors
Sure it could. Adblock is a well known cause of random slow-downs. Try disabling it and your issues should melt away.
Other than that, you must have something else installed that is causing issues. I’m afraid I don’t know what else it could be. I assume sites like gmail show the same tendencies. And if not, that doesn’t mean NewsBlur is the cause, since I am not hearing any other reports of slow downs.
I’d love to get to the bottom of this, but I’m almost certain it’s an extension.
Just tried (in this order) diabling for NewsBlur, global disable, and finally disabled completely from the AddOn page (Firefox 29.0.1 on Windows)… no change. 
Like I stated it is the same with no extensions loaded.
Took a short nap from about 1AM to 5AM (EST) and upon return the site is back to it’s normal “faster” mode. BTW: AdBlock is fully enabled. Something must have changed as I have changed nothing on my end.
Update 11PM: seems like the site slowed down again. Maybe the site logs will show something?