Slow websites? Google's Steve Souders explains

Have you ever been frustrated with slow-loading websites? Well, it might not even be related to inexplicable slow-downs in Mozilla Firefox, or to the site that you are visiting. Instead, the problem could be the presence of slow third-party servers belonging to ad companies. In an interview, Google performance guru Steve Souders agrees, noting that "Yeah. Ads being served, third party ads being served inside of web pages, is becoming more of a problem."

Souders went on to explain about how the infrastructure of ad services is tuned to insert advertisements into all kinds of pages, regardless of Web browsers. The result is that systems are just not tuned for performance. He explains, "Well, it's because 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."

You can read more about building faster websites from the interview transcript here.

For more on this story:
- check out this blog entry at O'Reilly Radar

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