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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.'"
Having worked for an ad-serving company, I'm pretty confident that the reason they don't care is that they're not measured on the speed at which they serve up ads.
If high-value websites started rejecting ad networks that served ads in less then x milliseconds after the rest of the page was downloaded, you'd see ad servers speed up, quick.
I realize that most websites run some version or another of "adverts", but generally speaking, most of those sites are marginal value to start. The sites I frequent usually use text ads, and not the flash (pun intended) graphical ads on some of the more questionable sites.
That actually reminded me of a short study I did in my English class a number of years ago. I wanted to know if you could get a quick feeling for the quality of a magazine based only on the number of advertisements/glossiness of the publication. Given the limited time and amount of money I was willing to spend I chose "Popular Science" and "Scientific American." PopSci had many more adverts than SciAm and, IMO, this means that SciAm is the better magazine. Yeah, it was a little subjective, but it was only a 5 page paper for an English class.
It's nice to see that the same thinking still applies to websites.
I don't mind flash. I use a click-to-flash plugin so I never actually see flash objects unless I click on them. If you use flash for ads, then you're paying to show me a grey rectangle. If you use it for content, then you need something around the edges to convince me to click on it. The problem with JavaScript is that it lacks modularity, so I can't distinguish the bit of JS that's needed for the site and the bit that's needed to irritate me. Any site that uses those awful ads that underline random words and pop up some crap when you mouseover them get blacklisted and never visited again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nonsense! I for one have chosen to keep my websites ad-free, hence no ad servers and no slowdown. The same goes for untold thousands of other webmasters.
If you've chosen differently then ... well, I suppose it's your website and your decision — but please don't come whining to us about the consequences.
In 1995, columnist and Ethernet-inventor Bob Metcalfe was again going on about a topic that eventually had him literally eating his words (he had to chop up a column in a blender with water and chug it) - that the Internet was going to collapse from all the heavy bandwidth demands of its exponentially-expanding clientele.
So I did a "View Source" on the Infoworld page with his column on it. I've lost the E-mail now, but the stats were something like his column being 2000 bytes and the sum of all the advertising around it, mostly GIF images at the time, was over 20,000 bytes. The Ad/Content ratio even then was over 10:1.
Metcalfe, who'd been railing against irresponsible bandwidth consumption in the column, could only plead that he had no control over the magazine's decisions on what went around it.
The web has always been the reverse of TV, where the ad/content bandwidth is about 1:4 or even 1:5. It's not far different from some magazines, though, where I swear there are 3 pages of ads for every page of content. And if you digitized the magazine, the ads would mostly be images, the content mostly text, and the ratio would be at least 10:1.
This is all prologue to new web content where you are slowed down not so much by download times as the start-up times for various Flash and JavaScript programs that make the ads so much more intrusive, zipping back and forth over the text you're trying to read, or just dancing in the corner of the page.
This is all necessary: they do what they MUST to get response from the ads. If the stats don't show a response, they stop buying them and the business model fails.
Everybody says "Nobody will pay for content on the Internet". Yes, they will. The put up with all that crap rather than pull out a credit card. They just pay with their time and attention instead of actual cash.
Rod Serling, one of the great TV writers of all time, once commented that it is hard to tell a story when you must work it around being interrupted every ten minutes by dancing rolls of toilet paper. I wonder what he'd think of writing for a medium where the toilet paper literally dances all over your words until you click on it to make it go back to the lower right frame.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Top 3 addins for privacy: Better Privacy, AdBlock Plus, and NoScript, hands down imo." - by MollyB (162595) on Monday November 30, @01:37PM (#30272526)
Per my subject line above? How about a GLOBAL solution, instead, & one that extends to ALL of your "webbound apps", instead, AND acts as "layered security" in combination with the FF/Mozilla only methods you use (which slow your browser down, use CPU cycles & more... where this solution does not & covers ALL webbound apps, globally)??
Ok, well then - Here we go, & on that note, specifically:
Here is a GOOD SOLID & GLOBAL WORK-AROUND, CALLED A HOSTS FILE!
(It works for more speed online, AND SECURITY ESPECIALLY... Also, it works for your money, because you pay for your linetime out of pocket most likely as I do, you can get back your speed, AND, gain security easily, & from a single easily edited file & a file eats no CPU cycles like a local DNS server can (& are not as security vulnerable either if you protect write access to a HOSTS file also)... Anyhow/anyways - Here goes:
SO - "that all said & aside"? Well, per your reply??
Hey - NO PROBLEM, 110% agreement here on that account... & more (like more speed online AND more security, via a SINGLE EASILY EDITED + POPULATED FILE, called a HOSTS file that extends to EVERY WEBBOUND APP YOU HAVE):
I use a custom HOSTS file, in addition to the tools others here in this thread have noted (which MANY like FF addons only really function for FireFox/Mozilla products, but don't extend globally to all other webbound applications, & that is part of what HOSTS files give you above the methods you extoll + utilize: "GLOBAL COVERAGE", & of ALL webbound apps, not just FireFox/Mozilla ones via the addons you noted + use yourself...).
HOSTS files can be used to blockout KNOWN "bad" adserves, maliciously coded sites or adbanners, and "botnet C&C servers" too!
You can obtain reliable HOSTS files from reputable lists for more security online, but also for speed!
(More on that later & WHY/HOW (I use reliable lists for that, such as these HOSTS @ Wikipedia.com -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file or those from mvps.org (a good one this one))
I also further populate & keep current my custom HOSTS file with up to date information in regards to all of those threats, via:
----
A.) Spybot "Search & Destroy" updates (populates HOSTS and browser block lists)
B.) Sites like ZDNet's Mr. Dancho Danchev's blog -> http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/
C.) Sites like FireEye -> http://blog.fireeye.com/
D.) SRI -> http://mtc.sri.com/
----
My HOSTS file incorporates ALL of the entries from the HOSTS files shown @ wikipedia as well... gaining me speed online (by blocking adbanners, which have been compromised many times the past few years now by malscripted exploits (examples below)).
(I combined ALL reputable HOSTS files with one of my own (30,000 entries), & I removed duplicates removed via a Borland Delphi app I wrote to do so called "APK HOSTS File Grinder 4.0++". That program also functions to change the default larger & SLOWER 127.0.0.1 blocking 'loopback adapter' IP address to either 0.0.0.0 (for VISTA/Windows Server 2008/Windows 7, smaller & thus faster than 127.0.0.1 default) or the smallest & fastest 0 "blocking 'IP ADDRESS'" (for Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 which can STILL use it (& it was added in a service pack on Windows 2000, only on 12/09/2008 MS patch tuesday was it removed for VISTA onwards (& now all these "phunny little bugs" are showing up as FLAWS in this new NDIS6 approach via WFP as well in the firewall, which ROOTKIT.COM has stated (with code too no less on how it is done) ->
From what I understand, it is. It's shown to those who have a high Karma, moderate, and meta-moderate. So, the good users. :)
I don't moderate or meta-moderate, and I don't think I have high karma, but I do get the check box for disabling ads. I think it might be related to the age of your account.