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Comments: 387 +- Technology: Are Ad Servers Bogging Down the Web? on Monday November 30, @12:25PM
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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.'"
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Kind of Fitting (Score:5, Insightful)
Give the UI back to the user and leave the flashing marquee tags in Las Vegas. The only reason you would use a swf is to achieve some display interaction/functionality not suitable for HTML+CSS+Javascript. This is common sense yet you willing host ads that urinate on common sense. If you want me to read an article on your site, you don't want moving flashing things annoying my eyes while I try to read text so why serve up only a technology (as all ads on Slashdot seem to be) that is designed just for that? Ah, of course, it's your biggest revenue stream. Well then, I guess I'll just dig in and prepare for the cycle to perpetuate ad infinitum. And these two guys can chat all they want about it but there's no solution; it's never going to end because it's Just the Way Things Are.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For the Flash cookies, maybe? Dunno what the trade-off is vs. users who block Flash by default.
Also, SWF can uses vector graphics and the animated files are tiny.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I was ignoring that checkbox until I realized that every time Slashdot hung while loading it was because I was waiting on a third-party ad server.
It's surprising there don't seem to be any quality-of-service clauses in the contracts between content providers and third-party advertisers.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I got it earlier this year too, I'm under the impression it's some sort of high karma perk though.
Re:Kind of Fitting (Score:5, Informative)
From what I understand, it is. It's shown to those who have a high Karma, moderate, and meta-moderate. So, the good users. :)
It's been on mine for several months, so I've been happy. :) I'm guessing it was about the time they implemented it, since I've been doing all the stuff above for years.
Parent
Re:Kind of Fitting (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, the main reason Flash is used is because it's "flashy" and draws more eyeballs to that space. Any additional tracking is just a side-benefit.
And everyone knows you can block ads if you really want to. Although Flash allows them to overlay ads over video and that kind of thing.
Re:Kind of Fitting (Score:4, Informative)
Flash objects store cookies in a location that is not covered by browser privacy controls.
These cookies stick with you even after you uninstall/reinstall the plugin, and can only be managed through a web interface on the flash website. So you're correct - flash bypasses traditional browser controls and provides advertisers a more persistent method of following a user across multiple domains.
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Re:Kind of Fitting (Score:5, Informative)
I have FlashBlock, but that doesn't stop sites from using Flash cookies [wikipedia.org], whether or not a flash movie is even played.
If you use Firefox, upgrade to version 3.5+ and install Better Privacy [mozilla.org] 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.
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Only MOZILLA/FF stuff protected YOUR way: Try this (Score:4, Interesting)
"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 [wikipedia.org] 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/ [blogspot.com]
C.) Sites like FireEye -> http://blog.fireeye.com/ [fireeye.com]
D.) SRI -> http://mtc.sri.com/ [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) ->
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Re:HOSTS FILES ARE THE BEST GLOBAL ANSWER (Score:5, Funny)
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Make it a statistic and they'll care (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Make it a statistic and they'll care (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yup. Second biggest offender is usually Google Analytics. Hell, I've often had Firefox hang while trying to pull up something from GA.
Re:Make it a statistic and they'll care (Score:4, Informative)
Second biggest offender is usually Google Analytics.
That's why it's usually interesting to host the JavaScript file, that seldom changes on your webserver, and only have the img that conveys the data retrieved from the foreign host.
JavaScript loading is usually blocking the rendering whereas img loading usually not.
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Re:Make it a statistic and they'll care (Score:5, Interesting)
JavaScript loading is usually blocking the rendering whereas img loading usually not.
NYT loads an astounding amount of JS. At home I use an especially slow dial-up and turn off image loading, so I was surprised to spend so much time waiting for "graphics8.nytimes.com". Then I looked in Firebug's Net panel. NYT home page launches 41 requests for 141K of data:
HTML: 5 requests, 31KB
CSS: 4 requests, 13KB
Flash: 2 requests, 37KB
JS: all the rest, 30 requests, 60KB
(Flashblock is allowing those 2 requests for some reason. I don't use AdBlockPlus.)
So next for me is to find or write an extension to block JS per-site.
Parent
Re:Make it a statistic and they'll care (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Make it a statistic and they'll care (Score:5, Informative)
The solution is simple: /etc/hosts
...
vi
add:
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
etc.
Even easier, as I thankfully learned from Slashdot a long time ago, this downloadable MVPS hosts file [mvps.org] instantly prevents connecting to ads, spyware as well as other "parasites" and is constantly updated.
Since adopting it, I no longer wait for ad servers and a side benefit is not even being exposed to the ads!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or, even simpler, use NoScript and AdBlock (with the auto-update list) in Firefox. Editing hosts is simple, I'm not arguing that. It's also free and relatively effective. With one change, your tip even works in Windows.
But NoScript and AdBlock are far more effective and even simpler to use and maintain.
hosts doesn't let you know when a new site wants to "get through", you have to see the ad and block it. It also allows everything you don't explicitly block. And it requires a complete match on the URL.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I used to do this, but got irritated with it blocking things that I wanted to do, e.g., filling out a survey about how dissatisfied I am with AT&T. They would redirect it through doubleclick and voila I'd get my 404. I'd have to fix the hosts file and then go back and refresh the browser. Very annoying.
I much prefer the flashblock approach, though I do allow ads to run in order to support the sites I visit (no AdBlock, etc.). There is no question that these ad servers need to be faster than the sites th
Re:Make it a statistic and they'll care (Score:4, Informative)
I believe (from a little experience dabbling in web design) that browsers generally run inline javascript as they encounter it - so since the ads are usually inline JS at/near the top of the page it prevents further loading while it's being handled.
Theoretically if you put the ads in the footer this wouldn't be such an issue since most of the page would load first - most places won't do that though since they want the ads prominently on the top/side of the site so you're more likely to click them (but seriously - who are these people that click ads??)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't count them either, because I can't count things I don't see. Call it what you want, but AdBlock works, and I think it upholds a tenet of free speech: Your right to say something doesn't burden me with an obligation to listen. I block the online ads, which in my view is no different from fast forwarding through them on a recording, or not paying attention to them during a live broadcast. As an added bonus, the ad servers save on bandwidth, making ads faster for those who wish to view them.
The only
Slow ads... (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite often you will be loading a website, and be staring at a blank screen with "making connection to ads.blablabla" at the bottom.... The page itself has loaded, but won't display until the browser has managed to retrieve the ads.
Also you will see ad servers in completely different locations to the site you're viewing, and therefore much slower.
Also, some ads are especially large, especially animated flash ones, and can add a noticeable delay to a page load even if the ad server isn't slow or lagged.
My pet hate btw, are ads which have sound... I find that EXTREMELY annoying and quickly block access to any ad provider which serves such things.
Re:Slow ads... (Score:4, Insightful)
What the hell does this have to do with the free market? Have you ever visited websites in China? Chinese sites are even more cluttered with intrusive advertising.
Whether you like it or not, hosting a site and providing content costs money. So there are two practical options. One, you charge for a subscription. Unfortunately, that almost never works because people seem to believe that access to content should be free. And if you're not providing unique content then you're going to have a hard time charging for what someone else is providing for free. So you're left with the second option, run advertising.
Now, I hate advertising for many reasons, among them are poor design quality, invasiveness and the deceptive nature of so many. Browser performance is another important issue, especially on my Mac where there has always been a tendency for browsers to completely lock up until the page loads. That's why I run ad blockers.
As usual, the power is in the hands of the people. If the vast majority of people cared enough to completely ignore ads, even if they don't outright block them we wouldn't be having this problem. All people would have to do is render advertising completely ineffective. But most people just don't care, even if the issue is raised with them. And who's to say that the alternative business models would be more appealing anyway.
At least this way we have a way of blocking ads. I suspect if the government got involved it wouldn't be to make ads less invasive, but rather ensure that we would have no way to block them. The free market requires that the average person be involved not rely on someone else to fix their problems for them.
Parent
i'm not a free market fundamentalist (Score:3, Insightful)
i believe the market needs to be highly regulated to prevent bubbles and pops and to prevent manipulation of smaller players by entrenched powers
having said that, i also understand that the market is the engine that drives innovation. the market needs to be controlled... but there needs to be a market
so when i see
"Yes. Another example of the free market working its wonders."
i see only an idiot who bites the hand that feeds it
dear genius: what is your alternative to making your favorite website run?
all of th
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, the problem with blocking ads is that if advertising revenue shrinks to the point where the web sites cannot support themselves, the sites will have to shift to something else.....perhaps back to the subscription model. We would be free to avoid those sites, but if too many quality sites went that way it would really suck. For that reason, I'll leave the Slashdot ads on instead of clicking the box saying I can turn them off. There was an ad for a free network monitoring software called "Splunk" the
AdBlock Plus (Score:3, Informative)
I don't even need to read the summary. (Score:4, Insightful)
Technology: Are Ad Servers Bogging Down the Web?
Yes. Period.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Can you send that to me in a Flash file?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No, but I took a screenshot of his response, and pasted it in a word file. Can I email that to you?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, you need to email it to me and the next ten people in your email list. Break the chain and somewhere a puppy will die!
Re:I don't even need to read the summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that ad servers tend to screw things up is nothing new. This guy's primary purpose is not so much to point that out, but rather to claim that Google's ad servers don't have that problem, so maybe web admins should use them instead.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Even more embarassing for Google - As I mentioned in another post, Google Analytics is one of the biggest offenders in the "makes page load stop and browser freeze for a few seconds" category.
no-script (Score:4, Insightful)
no-script for the win, yet again.
Security? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When the ads were in iframe? Very seldom. Not 10 years ago, and not today. I am telling you as a web-admin who manage ad-supported free hosting 10 years ago.
The advertiser wants the real estate. They wants floating icon and panels all over the web. For example, those turn page effect to reveal an Ad, or mouse over the flash to show a bigger floating DIV...these couldn't be done in iframe.
Plus, I heard google does no evil right? So people are so comfortable in inserting the adsense javascript tag right into
Flash Ads (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing bogs down a site like Flash.
Case in point: Boing Boing [boingboing.net].
Several months ago, Boing Boing got a new layout. The old layout worked fine, was easy to read, easy to scroll. The new Boing Boing stutters when scrolled ... it's annoyingly easy to lose your place and scroll way down or way up by mistake. Grrr ....
Re:Flash Ads (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Block 'em all... (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't new (Score:3, Insightful)
Every single time I end up thinking "Geez, this website is taking forever to load", I glance down at the status bar and see "Waiting for adserver3.adcompany.com". Then, I hit refresh and get another ad from another round robin'ed server, and the page loads sucessfully. It's very frustrating to know that the only reason the page is still blank or half-rendered is because of a third party ad.
In this regard, AdBlock makes a significant difference if you tell it to not download ads at all, but I am not comfortable with denying revenue streams to the websites I visit, after all, they are providing me with a service I enjoy, for free.
I just wish that all ads could be loaded last in a manner that doesn't affect the rendering of the website you're trying to view...
On a related note, the same applies to external javascript. Two transactional websites I maintain are sometimes slowed down to a crawl because of the crappy external Javascript marketing made us insert in the page header to track stuff. It's always very frustrating when things end up being slow because of third parties. I wish there was a simple way to cache these things.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why I use a targetted DNS black hole instead. I don't block ads until they cause a noticeable disruption in my browsing behavior. As soon as they add more than a second or so to a page load time, that particular ad server gets blocked permanently, and my cachi
I'm looking at you, Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
I've mentioned the ad bottleneck before. Slashdot is an especially bad offender. Pages use several ad servers, and they use "document.write" to stall the page load until the ad comes up. Even if you have the ad images blocked, some of the junk JavaScript still needs to run.
Some sites are just slow at serving pages. Behind my SiteTruth [sitetruth.com] system there is a specialized web crawler which looks for a business name and address on each web site. It never looks at more than 20 pages, and it's looking for pages like "About", "Contact", and about 40 other words which might plausibly lead to contact info. This process runs about 5-15 seconds for a well-implemented site. I log sites where it takes more than 45 seconds. About 5-10% of sites run overtime. In the last hour, the slowest site is "www.airsmaxkey.com", at 159 seconds to read 10 pages. (Yes, they're a bottom-feeder. Not only is there no business address on the site (a criminal offense in the European Union), they have logos from Verisign, PayPay, Verified by Visa, and MasterCard SecureCode, none of which are actually clickable to do the claimed verification. Nor does their shopping cart checkout use SSL. The whole site may be a scam. SiteTruth gives them a "Do Not Enter" rating.)
Some of the social networking sites have so much Javascript that Firefox will time out. (Facebook had that problem for a while. They fixed it.)
"Rich" content? That is rich... (Score:3, Insightful)
I propose a change of term for this sort of stuff. Instead of "rich" content call it "obese" content or "overloaded" content or "bloated" content. That "rich" term sounds desirable while often the opposite is true. Call the real useful stuff "enhanced" content or something similar...
It is under your control (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Webmasters hate slow ads too (Score:3, Informative)
There are quite a few webmasters who run their ads inside of iframes, as that usually avoids a slow ad holding up the rest of the page loading. The bad thing about that is that expandable ads (even polite, user-initiated) do not work. There are also some other tricks webmasters use, such as creating division tags and then using a bit of javascript trickery to move the ad loading to a point after the content loads.
Webmasters do hate slow ads (not to mention bad ads). I love direct sale campaigns on my site, because they almost always are run from my ad server. If that is slow, my whole site is slow anyway - and that happens very, very rarely (it has been months).
Old, old story (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
So I'll ask again (Score:4, Interesting)
Why can't the serving of ads be done from the primary website's server? There has to be some lightweight API that would allow for the host server to select from ads that were downloaded the night before and are all set, cached and ready to go. Not only would this level out performance to the level of the primary server but it would also, in lots of cases, defeat adblock. If the ad is coming from the website I went to then they have a lot more options for getting around adblock (in fact text ads served from the primary server are rather difficult to filter).
When I go to a site like cnet and I see that 5 websites want script access to my browser I have to shake my head. If any one of those sites is saturated then the whole website will load like a dog. I guess the only benefit I can see to this situation is that if an advertiser goes bad then that site, if it is separate, won't have script access to my browser. But if they'd all only accept text-only ads that would solve that.
This idea strikes me as something that somebody is going to make a fortune off of. They will develop a nice embedded model that works on the server side to pre-load ads and then simply query the ad server for the # of the ad the main server should present to the user. Lightweight, targeted, fast...a lot like google.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 on
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Do you even realize that the hosting/bandwidth for your marginal and questionable comment was paid for by adverts?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The last time I profiled some topsites in Firefox, well north of 50% of the CPU time was spent dealing with the Flash ads (as in, 50% of the time the CPU was busy during the pageload the program counter was inside the Flash plugin). Given the typical latency of the ad networks, I'd estimate over 40% of total load time on those sites was taken up by the ads.