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How Much Are Ad Servers Slowing the Web?
vipermac writes "Most of the times I have a problem with a Web page loading slow or freezing temporarily, I look down at the status bar and see that it's waiting on an ad server, Google Analytics, or the like. It seems to me that on popular Web sites the bottleneck is overwhelmingly on the ad servers now and not on the servers of the site itself. In my opinion we need a better model for serving ads — or else these services need to add more servers/bandwidth. Are there any studies on the delay that 3rd-party ad servers are introducing, or any new models that are being introduced to serve ads?"
What pisses me off are badly designed Flash ads. They use plenty of CPU power just to animate something completely useless. Last year Dell was running this ad on my local newspaper's site that took 80% of my CPU just to animate FALLING SNOWFLAKES. I complained to the website, and they took it down.
Some Flash ads barely take any CPU at all, and those are honestly fine by me, but some just hog my resources. The problem is that the people who DESIGN these ads typically have cutting-edge machines, so they don't know what it's like to run them on a shitty office machine. So, please, TEST your ads on a shitbox average computer before you force them on us!
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
My internet connection ain't free. If the ad folks want to use MY bandwidth they should pay me for the privilege.