How Much Are Ad Servers Slowing the Web?

vipermac writes "Most of the times I have a problem with a Web page loading slow or freezing temporarily, I look down at the status bar and see that it's waiting on an ad server, Google Analytics, or the like. It seems to me that on popular Web sites the bottleneck is overwhelmingly on the ad servers now and not on the servers of the site itself. In my opinion we need a better model for serving ads — or else these services need to add more servers/bandwidth. Are there any studies on the delay that 3rd-party ad servers are introducing, or any new models that are being introduced to serve ads?"

Browser's fault?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Is it possible for browsers to render everything *else* on a page while awaiting the ads to be served?

I realize this means performing some speculative page layout that may need to be re-done when the dimensions of the ads are served. But it sure would beat waiting tens of seconds to see the page's real content.

no slowdown at all...

[Endymion]

...for me at least. Blocking Google Analytics, Doubleclick, etc, with noscript has made my browsing experience much smoother. Not only is it nice to not have the random pauses while it hits the ad-server, not running the javascript has helped the render time on some pages as well (even if you still run the javascript for the page itself!)

Agreed

[garett_spencley]

I run a few web sites and on some I have a geo-IP targeted ad that loads in an iframe. This particular ad is often a bottleneck so I wanted to solve it. My first idea was to run a wget on the server and cache the output to the hard disk so I can load the ad from the server instead of a 3rd party. This would also require one less DNS look-up.

Then I realized that it would completely fail because the ad is geo-IP. So the cache will always display the location of my server, and not the user.

The obvious solution is for ad companies to offer scripts to their affiliates that could be run on the servers hosting the sites. Of course that opens up new problems, like security issues. But if the code were open we could spot such issues.

In fact, that seems to me like such a simple and obvious solution. The only reason that ad companies don't do that (that I can think of) is that they want to appeal to people running on free hosts where they can't run server-side scripts. But there's no reason not to offer both IMO. I also thought that they wanted to keep things as absolutely simple as possible, and there's nothing simpler than saying "just copy/paste this into your html document". But any web master who rents hosting (shared or dedicated) knows how to upload a php script.

Abusers aren't satisfied with one kind of abuse.

[Futurepower(R)]

The people who make ads are a self-destructive bunch. Numerous times I've waited for a Slashdot page to load while some ad server took its time. Abusing me with abusive, dishonest ads wasn't enough, they wanted to abuse me by wasting my time, too. Mentioning the problem to Slashdot editors brought only temporary fixes, or no change.

So now I don't see the ads at all, thanks to Firefox's AdBlock Plus [mozilla.org] and NoScript [mozilla.org] add-ons. (I recommend NoScript only for people who don't mind fiddling with permissions for each new web site.)

I guess abusers aren't satisfied with only one kind of abuse. I can dimly remember some of the Slashdot ads. When they weren't misleading, they were generally stupidly written. People with no technical knowledge shouldn't work for technical companies.

Re:Browser's fault?

[dpu]

Another option is to use the "DEFER" option in the script tag. Any script within the tags will wait until the page loads before executing. I wish ad companies would start using that *sigh*

Ads? or Webmasters?

[Evets]

The big problem is that most webmasters design their sites in such a way that they are dependent on a third party product being available prior to their pages being rendered.

Google isn't always up. Plenty of times, I see issues because my comcast connection can't see the google servers even though everyone else can get to them just fine.

It's entirely feasible to write your page in such a way that it can display data before any other files are loaded. Serve up ads in an iframe, include tracking images in an iframe or as the last element of a page, etc.

But ads aren't the only thing causing page load problems. Third party widgets, crazy fat CSS and JS files, and pages with way too many images are still a problem.

Re:Progressive loading

[SpankTheUser]

I work for a Very Large Online Publisher, and yeah, this is pretty much the key. There are few reasons for an ad or traffic counter to slow a properly designed page. In fact, displaying pages that render regardless of ads can turn out to be mission critical. A year ago, a story on one of our sites got Drudged, Slashdotted, Boing-Boinged, Dugg, etc. all at once. This is not totally unusual for us, and should not have been a problem for us to handle. However, the servers really started to slow down, and while the sites never went down completely, surfing our content got pretty painful. Culprit turned out to be an interesting interaction between users, ad servers, and our site. We had a slow loading ad that was appearing on most of our page. Because the HTML wasn't well designed, the page content wouldn't load until the ad appeared. Users presumably have figured this out, and would click re-load on their browser over and over again until the ad server finally responded to one of their requests. Result: actual number of requests to our servers grew by an order of magnitude over what we'd normally expect for a given number of actual users. We wrote up a presentation entitled "Slow ads + bad HTML = Company Left $XXX,XXX On the Table" and got the funding to re-code all our templates.

Re:Browser's fault?

[FireFury03]

Is it possible for browsers to render everything *else* on a page while awaiting the ads to be served?

Most ad systems seem to work by placing a <script> tag where you want the ad to appear which loads a script from the ad server that does a document.write() to insert the actual code. This is very bad practice (and explicitly disallowed for XHTML) but even Google do it (which sucks since I have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get AdSense to work on my XHTML site).

document.write() works by actually writing out HTML and feeding it into the parser and thus parsing the page must be suspended at that point until it's finished executing, so you can't render the page until the advert has loaded.

The _correct_ way to do this is for the ad-serving Javascript to actually modify the DOM tree. But that requires the ad server developers to not be lazy and have clue, which seems to be asking too much. (or alternatively, don't use Javascript at all).

Re:Browser's fault?

[Shados]

Good point. When I posted that, I had in mind the typical mainstream sites, like news web sites, this very one, etc. Web sites made by professionals. Even blog web sites tend to have a few software engineers behind em, the bloggers don't make the engine.

Don't see THAT many ad driven web site made in MS Word these days...

Re:High-CPU Flash Ads

[StarfishOne]

I know all too well what you're describing. Quite a bit of relief is found in the following Firefox extension:

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]

This extension replaces flash movies/objects with a button you can click to view them. You can also whitelist certain websites (e.g. YouTube) to always show the flash movie directly.

I do have to note though that when trying to whitelist a website I am viewing at that very moment, the extension does crash my browser every now and then. It might be something on my machine though! Anyway, with FireFox being able to restore sessions now, I find it a 'must have' extension to block out those CPU-consuming flash movies. I truly hate them

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you get mod points. I haven't had the ability for easily five years now despite consistently having excellent karma.

Perhaps that's the beauty of the metamoderation system?

Re:0 slowdown for me

[LiquidCoooled]

Viruses mainly come from insecure browsers and user stupidity.

The biggest (solvable) problem with porn (and other) sites is link/statusbar hijacking where you click one link and are redirected to another site not related.

The solution involves preventing access to the statusbar and unfolding the links (with a greasemonkey script).

I will not click anything which I cannot see the resultant page.

Re:what ads?

[tachyonflow]

Ha! This is funny *and* insightful. A co-worker and I are frequently researching web sites, checking out the potential competition to our business ideas, and such. More often than not, I look at a web site and say, "I totally don't understand their business model. How can they fund this sort of a web site without any ads at all? Oh... wait..." Many times it's: "XYZ web site has ads now, you say? No way! When did they start putting ads up?" Heh...

Privoxy, Adblocker & NoScript

[avicarmi]

Privoxy can also be installed on windows, it is browser independent.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[v1]

But isn't that like saying if you don't look at the bilboard as you drive down the highway, or at the ad poster on the subway, or walk into the kitchen for a snack during the commercial break, that you're a theif? The television example is probably the best and easiest to associate with.

Advertisements are an opportunity to make an impression on a customer. While there will always be technologies that make it difficult to ignore the ad, in most cases you are not obligated to be impressioned. Just because the advertisers get upset that you are stealing the cheese from their trap, it's your prerogative.

I'm a little surprised that we don't see more "banner" ads on TV. Imagine all these people with the widescreen sets that are viewing content with black sides because it's 4x3 formatted instead of widescreen. Imagine banners on both of those dead zones on the sides, that change every 20-30 seconds and adjust their product to something related to the main feature. Y know I think I would prefer that to the "four miniutes of commercials every 10 minutes" we get now. Also, even though a lot of shows are timed for like 49 minutes for the hour to accomodate commercials, a lot of stations trim out scenes or cut them short to insert more ads, so we would be getting more content. I wouldn't mind them doing this so long as they were not animated. Sort of like how I can't stand the animated shockwave banners here and at other sites. I don't understand why no one is doing this already. Though I have seen a few isolated examples of banner ads being shot across the bottom of the screen briefly during some shows - those are overlays though and degrade the content so maybe that's why those have been unsuccessful.