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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?"
Can't say that I noticed any of slowdown on Friday. All of the content continued to stream from my custom ad server (127.0.0.1) at exactly the same speed as usual...
Even at times of average load you can see delays as the browser goes off to find some unresponsive ad server. Google analytics and other stat-gatherers can be a problem too. It's annoying when it prevents the appearance of a page. Seems easily solvable within the browser though, set content from other domains to be on a shorter timeout. If the site fails because some off-server content isn't available, that's a badly-designed site. Ordinarily I'd just miss out on a few ads. Boo hoo!
Many news web sites use advertising networks rather than serving ads from their own servers.
Luckily I don't deal with ads. But if I did, I would try to work something out where I'd have a temporary directory with the cached ads ... especially if they were some hit-the-monkey-resource-intensive-flash-ad. Then I'd have a cron job or maybe just a servlet running on a timer that queries my ad provider's site for new ads, replace the ads in the directory with their names being generic so that they can be randomly selected based on size and ... you're a whole lot nicer for the internet. Sure, now it's your traffic that's being taxed but at least you're not taking part in a massive attack on your ad server.
... but when they're hogs like the article's flash ads are, you would expect some better design or fallback.
I understand the beauty of not knowing anything about the ads and just getting whatever AdSense or AdWords or whoever serves you up your ads
My work here is dung.
Whenever the ad servers get to a critical overusage point, replace them with a set of text ads. Or better yet, replace them with a text ad for AdBlock Plus. Hey, a guy can dream, right?
Ryan Fenton
I'll bet THAT isn't in the autopsy report.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
RIP, Billy Mays.
Billy Mays ordering at McDonalds
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Trolling is a art,
I would have been first to post but the bloody advertising bottlenecked me. I'm going to head over to Rotten Tomatoes, I'm sure that won't happen there.
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?
Without those ads, there would not be the high number of news sites available for viewing breaking news stories that can drive this Jacko level of interest.
Google has always appealed to me because of it's VERY basic homepage. No extra crap unless you want it there (iGoogle). I understand that it would be hard for a website to thrive without a method of revenue, either through a store or ads, but I tend to stick with sites that keep ads to a minimum. I've even stopped going to sites because of the overbearing amounts of ads. Slashdot has a nice system too. Giving you the option to turn off ads if you contribute.
"The Y chromosome is genetic. The odds are very good that if you are male then your father was too." -Internet Commenter
Can someone explain to me why this phenomenon occurs? Is content loaded serially, one item at a time?
Reflow is my best guess. The browser has all the data for the rest of the page, but it doesn't know what width and height to give to an ad object until it has loaded.
When running on a browser without ad block, pages will take forever to load. The basic shell will come up but it will lag when feeding content from the advertiser servers. You cannot move on with your life until the ad loads and the page content will not load until the ad. Very annoying.
Also surprising is how much of the lag comes from the computer, not the bandwidth. I upgraded the home machine recently and am amazed at how quickly sites load now. I'd assumed previously that delays in loading were just waiting for data from the site but it appears that there's a lot of overhead with the bloat that is the modern browswer. I'm guessing there's a lot of web 2.0 bullshit going on in the background. You can't escape it by disabling Javascript because that'll break most of the sites out there.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
They *are* loading the "primary content" first. They just differ with you as to what constitutes "primary".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
first of all let me pretext all this with the fact I have been working in online advertising for about 5 years for a caouple of major publishers and now an agency side adserving company. The industry as a whole has a glut of technical knowledge and is mostly sales driven. Calls to adservers usually use a call to an external javascript file which is dynamically generated by the adserver. When this call is made it passes along some variables to let the adserver know how that position is targeted. At this time some tracking also happens, so the system will count an impression against a certain ad. For this reason caching can't be done - the system has to record and decide which ad to return on the fly to make sure delivery is correct and possibly even do some optimizations around which ad to show. Think of it as a giant decision engine which also collects data and uses that to decide what to serve next. There is another way to call in an ad, and that is to use Iframes, unfortunately these will point at a different domain so it isn't possible to resize or do anything outside the box, unless the ad being served is a rich media provider who are allowed to have another little html page on the site's domain they can call up and then use to write back to the main page. Because of all the different types of javascript that can be served back depending on the company providing the ad, the ad has to be put in place if using javascript as it will often look at where in the DOM the script is called. There are too many providers doing different things, and the only way to make things work is to call it straight in.
for(b=(a=0)+1;;b+=(a+=b))print(a+"\n"+b+"\n");
Last week we had 3 celebrity deaths in rapid succession, but thanks to Billy Mays, he throws in a 4th one for ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!!
There is an easy solution to this problem. Take advertising back into your own hands. Don't sign up for some stupid ad network to shovel punch the monkey ads all your site. Forming a relationship with companies your viewers are actually interested in will deliver better results for the advertisers and for your visitors. Don't let them cover your page in huge javascript overlays and other nonsense, doing so shows they don't respect your content or your visitors. Yes, it takes more work, but the end result is better and more profitable.