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Are Ad Servers Bogging Down the Web?
blackbearnh writes "The work of making high-volume web sites perform well is an ongoing challenge, and one that continues to evolve as the nature of web content changes. According to Google Performance Guru Steve Souders, fat JavaScript libraries and rich content are creating new problems for web site tuning, but one of the biggest problems lies outside the control of web site administrators — ad servers. In an interview previewing the upcoming Velocity Online conference run by O'Reilly, Souders talks at length about the real causes of poor web performance today, and in particular, the effect that poorly performing ad servers are creating. 'We adopted a framework of inserting ads, of creating ads, that's pretty simple. And because it's pretty simple, it's not highly tuned. That's one reason why we shouldn't be too surprised that we see performance issues in third party ads. The other reason is that ad services are not focused on technology. Certainly companies like Yahoo and Google and Microsoft, we're technology companies. We focus on technology. So it's not surprising that our web developers are on the leading edge of adopting these performance best practices. And it's also not surprising that ad services might lag two, three or four years behind where these web technology companies are.'"
The solution is simple: /etc/hosts
vi
add:
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 twx.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 googleads.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 partner.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 analytics.live.com
127.0.0.1 ads1.msn.com
etc.
I have FlashBlock, but that doesn't stop sites from using Flash cookies, whether or not a flash movie is even played.
If you use Firefox, upgrade to version 3.5+ and install Better Privacy and you can blow away these nasties (each one can be up to 100kb binary data by default, with no expiration, ever), which btw are OS- and browser-independent. You will be shocked at the baggage they've saddled you with till now...
Top 3 addins for privacy: Better Privacy, AdBlock Plus, and NoScript, hands down imo.