Comments on: CDN performance: Downloading jQuery from Google, Microsoft, and Edgecast CDNs

By: Webstandard-Blog

Webstandard-Blog — Tue, 18 May 2010 10:30:16 +0000

Really good idea, especially the JavaScript-Framework jQuery is growing and growing. Thx for the comparison beteween thos 3 opportunities!

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:58:37 +0000

Dave – will be interested to see your results, because the Pingdom results above don’t back your confidence in the Google net. Quite the opposite: they fared the worst in all tests and all regions. (Which also makes me wonder WHY so many top sites use it, but that’s another story.) And are you absolutely sure about MSN cookies? That doesn’t make much sense to me, but I’ll need to think and research that more.

Richy: based on my testing experience for clients, I have found that Amazon is almost always the slowest. Akamai, EdgeCast and Limelight are the fastest. Although, Akamai is a beast to work with (on the business side) and their pricing/commitments are very high.

Also, Amazon seems content going after the bottom of the market – low prices, no commit, etc. – and don’t seem interested in offering the features and services that would attract the big guys. And that’s just fine, there’s probably a ton of money to be made there. But it’s not going to attract the top sites.

By: Dominik Deobald

Dominik Deobald — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:27:30 +0000

Quite interesing to note: jQuery 1.4.2 is about 6kb smaller on Google than it is on Microsoft.

By: Pádraig Brady

Pádraig Brady — Thu, 13 May 2010 08:49:39 +0000

On a related note, one has to be very careful how one references the CDN content: http://nichol.as/how-google-is-wasting-your-bandwidth

By: cancel bubble

cancel bubble — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:58:39 +0000

I was just going to reference the zoompf.com blog article – it’s a very interesting read.

By: Dave Ward

Dave Ward — Wed, 12 May 2010 00:09:28 +0000

Another issue with the Microsoft CDN is that microsoft.com isn’t a cookieless domain. If you’re referencing that CDN on your site and your user has microsoft.com cookies, that CDN request is needlessly burdened with them.

Ultimately, it’s tough to beat the Google CDN due to its ubiquity. Using any other CDN, you’re wagering that your users haven’t recently been to another site using the Google CDN (since that results in your jQuery reference being sourced instantly from the user’s cache). I recently analyzed the sites in Alexa’s top 200,000 and found that thousands of those are using the Google CDN. So, I think that betting against users having Google’s copy cached is a bad bet.

I’ll be posting more detailed information about what I found in that Alexa top 200k analysis on my blog in the next couple weeks, if anyone’s interested.

By: Billy Hoffman

Billy Hoffman — Tue, 11 May 2010 22:37:14 +0000

We did some research back in January about how prevalent different CDNs are that offer free hosting of common JavaScript libraries. The full post is here, but the short story is due to the lack of critical mass, using a JavaScript library CDN actually hurts performances, it doesn’t help performance.

Our full research is here: http://zoompf.com/blog/2010/01/should-you-use-javascript-library-cdns

By: Maykel Rodriguez

Maykel Rodriguez — Tue, 11 May 2010 19:50:00 +0000

Hi Richy, I would be interested in compiling some Internap CDN stats, would you mind emailing me at maykelrr at speedyrails dot com?

Thanks!

By: Maykel Rodriguez

Maykel Rodriguez — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:58:33 +0000

Hi guys, what a coincidence, I had twitted (@speedyrails) about our tests between EdgeCast CDN and CloudFront earlier today (http://www.speedyrails.com/cdn/howfast) and these results are great! I’m going to include a link to this post in our site.

By: Richy C

Richy C — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:48:32 +0000

We have the majority of our “static files” on the Internap CDN – and jQuery is one of those files. Let me know if you would be interested in compiling stats against it for inclusion. It’ll be nice for a comparison against most “business CDNs” such as Internap, Amazon Cloudfront, Limelight, Cachefly and Rackspace Cloud.