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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?"
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!
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 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.
The best way to deal with this sort of thing is to do regular checks as to how long hitting the address that's going to be loaded takes, in a cron job or whatever, and if it goes over a certain threshold, turn off that provider.
Sure, you'll lose a bit of ad revenue, but you won't have pissed off users who think your site is broken.
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.
Hope you don't mind, but I'm using your ad server too.
Dang you must have one hell of a pipe to the internets.
It's....FAST
Sent from your iPad.
Last week we had 3 celebrity deaths in rapid succession, but thanks to Billy Mays, he throws in a 4th one for ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!!
Yeah this is news? Man the main reason why I originally started blocking ads was not because I necessarily objected to them, it was because the ad servers always seem to hang up the page loads. Web 2.0 as it is called simply made this problem even worse with sites cross loading content. Web 2.0 sucks!
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
The worst part about stories like this is having to skip past the 3 dozen Slashdot posts that all say "I don't see ads because I block them! Hyuk! Hyuk!"
Yes, we all get it. Lots of Slashdotters block ads. We know. We've read it a million times on this site. Could you just shut the hell up so we can comment on the actual story? Thank you.
Comment of the year
Indeed. I have a lighttpd instance running on my computer just for this reason. It serves up a single page containing only the following text:
404 - ad fail
And if anyone is wondering why I'm running an HTTP server just for this it's because serving the 404 kills the request much quicker than letting the browser timeout the connection. Lighttpd is very light on resources but also allows me to have access logs, which allows me to get some interesting data. For instance, I split the logs up by month and here are some of the sizes:
I've also written a perl script to import the logs into an SQLite database. Which allows things like:
All hosts blocked with over 1,000 hits (from the aforementioned April to June logs)
The worst part about stories like this is having to skip past the 3 dozen Slashdot posts that all say "I don't see ads because I block them! Hyuk! Hyuk!"
Sounds like you need an AdBlock Ad Blocker. It hides any posts that may be construed as viral advertisements to block advertisements from your browser. It allows those like you and me to learn about new car insurance rates and punch the monkey in peace.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
I think those comments can be meaningful. I avoid doing massive ad blocking, but in some cases, I've blocked ads from locations that created major slowdown in page loads.
It's an example of why ad delivery services are failing us: In modern browsers, delays for ad loading do happen from time to time, regardless of the size of your internet tubes. Bad performance makes even users that aren't ad averse want to block them, just for the performance gain, just like aggressive DRM makes users that have no problem paying for software be tempted to become pirates.