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Ad Networks the Laggards In Jackson Traffic Spike
miller60 writes "Advertising networks are being cited as the major bottlenecks in performance woes experienced by major news sites during the crush of Internet traffic Thursday as news broke about the death of pop star Michael Jackson. An analysis by Keynote found that many news sites delivered their own content promptly, only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads. The inclusion of third-party content on high-traffic pages is a growing challenge for site operators. It's not just ads, as social media widgets are also seeing wider usage on commercial sites. How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?"
I can see how the ads would be the bottleneck in serving a site... if not only because it's the same case for users with most sites on normal days too.
Very often I'm stuck waiting for the ads to load, before the actual site shows up on computers where I don't have the luxury of an adblocker; And even with an adblocker I sometimes see my computer still using some resources to get the ads down.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
The ads are usually javascript scripts which in turn are requesting external pages by document.write()ing out iframes to the content page which in turn may have their own resources (js/css/jpg/gif/etc) to request. A lot of browsers don't like showing you the entire page until the javascript bits have been requested, hence the delay.
Of course the technical details are er... more detailed, but you get the idea.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads.
Well, duh. I've been complaining about this for the past year. Too much ad code is using "document.write()", often for no really good reason. Browsers can load content from multiple sites in parallel, and not wait for ad content, unless Javascript is used to prevent that. All too often, Javascript is used in just that way. (As on, well, Slashdot. Earth to Slashdot: your Javascript is embarrassingly slow. Get someone with a clue.)
One of the more painful things I have to do for AdRater is to recognize dynamically loaded ad content. Google ads are loaded using at least five completely different code styles. So I actually have to look at other people's ad-serving code in some detail. It's not fun. Fortunately, one generic mechanism handles most of the cases; I don't have to track their code changes in detail.
Most of this doesn't seem to be intended to get around ad-blocking software, and isn't successful at that. It's usually either tracking-related, concerned with displaying the ad in a different CSS context than that of the surrounding content, or just the result of ineptly cutting and pasting JavaScript from multiple sources.