Comments on: Google Hosting YUI Files on ajax.googleapis.com

By: Adrian Kalbarczyk

Adrian Kalbarczyk — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:44:59 +0000

I live in Poland (Warsaw) and I have good DSL connection from our biggest internet provider TP SA. My ping’s for Yahoo are 160ms. Traceroute shows me that files are in UK, but packets was sended through US! This is the list of cities: Warsaw, New York, Ashburn, Dallas, London. For Google ping is 50ms and they are delivered directly from Germany (maybe from Frankrurt Am Main). For development purposes I choose Google. For site it’s still better to have minimized copy on own server.

By: Harvey

Harvey — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:52:11 +0000

@Harvey:

Good to know. Might not be the best idea in an HTTPS environment to use externally hosted code. This does give a points towards using Google over Yahoo for CDN.

By: Harvey

Harvey — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 17:27:07 +0000

Thanks for the information!

It’s interesting google offers https, while yahoo does not.

By: Eric Miraglia

Eric Miraglia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:20:13 +0000

@Kamil T. — My guess is that in most of the world you’ll be better off using combo-handled files from the Yahoo servers than individual files from the Google servers. I provided some urls in the comments above with a rudimentary way to test this in your own locale, but it’s a crude test. I do think there are parts of the world where Google will outperform Yahoo and vice versa. Regards, Eric

By: Kamil T.

Kamil T. — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:56:07 +0000

Google is more global (has more hardware around the world) then US-centric Yahoo, so I guess it’s better to use Google CDN for global websites and Yahoo one for US. Am I right?

By: Eric Miraglia

Eric Miraglia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:01:26 +0000

@Andrew — No, we haven’t submitted YUI3 to Google for hosting yet. Once we get out of preview mode we’ll work on getting YUI3 up there as well as YUI2. Keep in mind that the granularity of the modules and submodules in YUI3 make combo-handling a matter of some importance when it comes to performance, and Google does not support combohandling on its Ajax library CDN yet — so the Yahoo CDN may be significantly more performant for YUI3. -Eric

By: Andrew Wooldridge

Andrew Wooldridge — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:49:24 +0000

Are the YUI3 files hosted there too yet? What would the url be?

By: Eric Miraglia

Eric Miraglia — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:11:57 +0000

@bws — The Google team just got the files loaded, and they’re in the process of updating the documentation. You’ll see that and their blog post soon. -Eric

By: bws

bws — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:56:00 +0000

Although I do see YUI hosted at the location mentioned, it is not listed on the site as a library currently hosted there (see http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/)... not even a blog entry on their blog (see http://googleajaxsearchapi.blogspot.com/).

By: Eric Miraglia

Eric Miraglia — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:08:28 +0000

@Eric, To add to what Sam observed, here is the result of a simple test with ten iterations loading the JS requirements for DataTable -- four files without combo handling, 1 file with combo handling, empty cache: Yahoo CDN individual files: 585.4ms Yahoo CDN combo handled file: 401.2ms Google CDN individual files: 1007.1ms I used FF3, Mac OSX, running on a DSL line in the Bay Area. My guess is that, around the world, you'd see a lot of variation; however, I would expect that you'd always see the combo-handled file outperform the individual files. Regards, Eric