I have a suggestions. It's possible you've run into a "bad ad" which Erik would like to hear about.
http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/reward-earn-diamond-membership-by-finding-and-reporting-bad-ads
And someone in another thread suggested disabling Adobe Flash Player since many of the ads rely on it to animate themselves. And of course there are ad blockers...
Have you heard of adblock?
I strongly believe that an honest person would only either tolerate the ads, deal with them some other way, subscribe for legitimate ad free service (as I have since done) or stop using the website. If you're a user of the site that enjoys an ad-free ad-funded experience, then you are absolutely causing the website on which you rely for fun to lose money giving you this service, and you are a free rider.
Ad blockers are a form of dishonesty, which I think many conveniently choose to believe is justified because businesses making money off of giving a paid service, instead of giving it away for free, is immoral and deserves to be subverted. Which is why you should also steal from Wal Mart, steal cable, steal music from your favourite artists and their record label, and pretty much get anything you can for free. Because having to pay for stuff is not fair. Other people giving you everything you want at their own expense and getting nothing in exchange for it, now that's freedom!
This is the dozenth time I've lost a game because of, not regular continuous lag, but unnecessary unpredictable overwhelming spikes of lag, during blitz endgames. I realize this is essentially a free site, and a business, and your goal is to make money, most respectably so, but speaking as an unsatisfied "customer" I'm not sure this is the best way for a chess website to make its money.
The problem is that your advertisements re-roll periodically even if during a game, and whenever this happens, depending on which ad, how long the flash module's been running, etc., it can either cause my whole internet browser to freeze completely solid for 1 second, or it can freeze it for half a minute; or it can even crash the browser entirely so that I have to reload the site to continue my game. Again, this happens whenever the ads are changing over from one to another.
If the ads would just load at a set time during the game, say at the very beginning and again exactly half way through (for blitz) - and perhaps exclusively before and after games for bullet - then that would reduce headaches by a tremendous margine. Alternatively, perhaps you could somehow smoothe out the lag, so that you can load and re-load a bajillion ads without disrupting the core user experience at all.
I mean, you obviously make a fair share of your revenue from free users, right? Profitability doesn't rely that heavily on subscriptions,which actually disable the ads and thereby just trade one type of revenue for another? Isn't it very important that you keep your users happy with the business model that makes your money, if you can reasonably easily do so?
Am I the only one experiencing this problem?
Thank you for your time.