There’s a good article on the use of a content delivery network(CDN) to speed up delivery of your static page elements (logos, JavaScript that doesn’t change, HTML that doesn’t change, etc.) over at Building Browsergames.
I use a CDN now for Big Villain but only in one small area of the game. Yahoo! makes available all their stylesheets (which I use) and their JavaScript YUI stuff on their own CDN and you are not just permitted but encouraged to pull your copies from their CDN. But until I read the article above it had never occurred to me to try using the Coral CDN which is generally available to spread out availability of your own page elements. I’ll have to try that and see what effect it has on the performance of my pages.
I do know that I can get the Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript libraries I’m using now from Google’s CDN but the one and only time I tried that it was unbelievably slow. I’ve been meaning to try it again though because I’m assuming that it must have just been a glitch.
I've been using Google's Ajax APIs for my jQuery lately(you probably noticed that in the accessibility demos from earlier), and I've noticed that the slowdown seems to be intermittent - most of the time, the connection + retrieval for the script is pretty fast, but probably 3/100 times or so it seems to just *crawl*.
ReplyDeleteOne the one hand, users(hopefully) only need to download the script once - and it should already be cached if they've visited another site hosting off the Ajax APIs. If they haven't...yet another argument for keeping scripts at the end of your <body> tag, I suppose.