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How Much Are Ad Servers Slowing the Web?

Posted by kdawson on from the but-not-for-firefox dept.

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?"

4 of 363 comments (clear)

  1. Browser's fault? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is it possible for browsers to render everything *else* on a page while awaiting the ads to be served?

    I realize this means performing some speculative page layout that may need to be re-done when the dimensions of the ads are served. But it sure would beat waiting tens of seconds to see the page's real content.

    1. Re:Browser's fault? by dpu · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Another option is to use the "DEFER" option in the script tag. Any script within the tags will wait until the page loads before executing. I wish ad companies would start using that *sigh*

      --
      Dammit, I meant to post that anonymously!
    2. Re:Browser's fault? by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Is it possible for browsers to render everything *else* on a page while awaiting the ads to be served?

      Most ad systems seem to work by placing a <script> tag where you want the ad to appear which loads a script from the ad server that does a document.write() to insert the actual code. This is very bad practice (and explicitly disallowed for XHTML) but even Google do it (which sucks since I have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get AdSense to work on my XHTML site).

      document.write() works by actually writing out HTML and feeding it into the parser and thus parsing the page must be suspended at that point until it's finished executing, so you can't render the page until the advert has loaded.

      The _correct_ way to do this is for the ad-serving Javascript to actually modify the DOM tree. But that requires the ad server developers to not be lazy and have clue, which seems to be asking too much. (or alternatively, don't use Javascript at all).

      --
      http://blog.nexusuk.org
  2. Abusers aren't satisfied with one kind of abuse. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The people who make ads are a self-destructive bunch. Numerous times I've waited for a Slashdot page to load while some ad server took its time. Abusing me with abusive, dishonest ads wasn't enough, they wanted to abuse me by wasting my time, too. Mentioning the problem to Slashdot editors brought only temporary fixes, or no change.

    So now I don't see the ads at all, thanks to Firefox's AdBlock Plus and NoScript add-ons. (I recommend NoScript only for people who don't mind fiddling with permissions for each new web site.)

    I guess abusers aren't satisfied with only one kind of abuse. I can dimly remember some of the Slashdot ads. When they weren't misleading, they were generally stupidly written. People with no technical knowledge shouldn't work for technical companies.