Tech Stuffs

Advertlets – Slowing Down Your Blogs~

advertlets.jpgAdverlets is one of the Asia’s first blog advertising network that is based in Malaysia. Do you put their ads in your blogs? If you do, you might notice that it takes up quite a lot of time to load up if you are using slow internet connection.

Every time the ads loads up, your browser needs to download some data from the Advertlets’ server. Crynobone asked me to check my site with Firebug Firefox extension to check on the load time. Both of us were surprised of the ads data load amount!

advertlets.PNG

As you can see, in order to load up the ads, you need to download a few javascripts. What surprises us is that there are 3 javascripts – prototype, scriptaculous and effects, need to be downloaded TWICE every time the ads loads up! Strange? That’s not all. Look at the size of those javascripts, the total size of the 3 javascripts are 113KB, which total up to 113KB x 2 = 226KB of data to be downloaded every time the ads loads up!

What are they doing anyway? Showing off their powerful servers? 😆 I seriously think that the programmers from Advertlets should really look into this problem. A 72KB javascript is very heavy and will slow down the load time of a blog. Apart from that, loading TWICE the javascripts will take up quite a lot of time. Since they are targeting advertisements on blogs, I don’t think they want to slow down our blogs right?

I hope this problem will be solved soon, or else Malaysian blogs will be loading slower and slower! 👿 What’s your opinion on this? 😉 By the way, please fill in my Advertlets poll… I need a few more to get my status verified I think. 😆

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An engineer which have a lot of interests in gadgets and technology stuffs. The blog varies from life events to gadgets reviews and hacks.

11 Comments

  • Musa

    Thats soo true! I just noticed that recently when I added more add, my blog become freaking slow to load up! its irritating when I have to wait, and wait, wait to get the link that I wants from the blog.

  • Josh Lim

    Hi Meng Hua,

    Thanks for your comments. Your detailed comments are appreciated, and yes, we are aware of the loadtime, and we are looking into this.

    But just so you know, there isn’t “double-loading” happening – although the file is loaded twice, the second time it is loaded from the cache and no additional resources are used.

    However, we are aiming to make the code more lean and efficient, so check back in about 5 days time and let us know if its better 🙂

  • crynobone

    It’s just about the JavaScript being downloaded twice, yes Josh might be right that his server load would still be the same but what about click load. Now I don’t have any solid prove because I never really conduct test to benchmark the browser performance when loading a script or even images multiple time but I pretty much sure I have an effect (when your in a low capability CPU).
    Among other thing, I seen some WP Plugin that use Prototype.js such Lightbox 2, WP Grin and so on and still Advertlets require internet user to download they Prototype.js again. Thus making it not optimize and slow down the user experience.
    How to optimize this:
    1. Instead of downloading everything, you evaluate whether Prototype.js have been loaded using Prototype.Version object.
    2. Optimize the JS, strip function that are not being use.
    3. Compress the JS.

  • Josh Lim

    Hi Menghua,

    Josh Lim from Advertlets here. Noticed you’re running the new lighter version of the Advertlets javascript code. It should be much faster for you know, cheers!

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