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Ad Networks the Laggards In Jackson Traffic Spike

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the what-else-is-new dept.

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?"

6 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. No surprise by LordSnooty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:No surprise by iamapizza · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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      Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
  2. Re:Load the ads last by John+Hasler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They *are* loading the "primary content" first. They just differ with you as to what constitutes "primary".

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    Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
  3. Billy Mays RIP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Last week we had 3 celebrity deaths in rapid succession, but thanks to Billy Mays, he throws in a 4th one for ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!!

  4. Re:Didn't notice... by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Comment of the year
  5. Re:Didn't notice... by unfasten · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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:

    • June (to date): 2.95 MB with 13,550 lines
    • May: 2.87 MB with 11,354 entries
    • April: 2.69 MB with 14,931 entries

    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)

    req_subd req_domain Total hits

    ad doubleclick 14556
    www google-analytics 3927
    media fastclick 3339
    ads adbrite 1920
    content pulse360 1692
    ad yieldmanager 1158