Why does AskMe loading depend on dynamic.fmpub.net?

June 4, 2006 2:01 AM

dynamic.fmpub.net: It's come up before, and I know I can block it in my hosts file, but why does loading/rendering the entirety of Ask.Metafilter depend on contacting this site? When it is slow to respond, the entire site seems to hang, which should be avoided.
posted by knave to Bugs at 2:01 AM (7 comments total)

There's ads on the page somewhere that connect to it--if you 'View Source' and search in the source for that address, you'll see it. Since I use Adblock I have no idea exactly which ads are causing it--last I knew Matt only used AdSense?--but that's what's doing it.

As for causing your browser to hang, well, nothing can be done about that--either an element is in a page or it isn't, and if it is, your browser's gonna request it.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 6:03 AM on June 4, 2006

You could always point it to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:41 AM on June 4, 2006

As for causing your browser to hang, well, nothing can be done about that--either an element is in a page or it isn't, and if it is, your browser's gonna request it.

I see the same behavior as knave. Thing is, the main body of Ask.Me wont load until it can reach dynamic.fmpub.net.

Now I admit to being a browser rendering neophyte, but why cant it connect asynchronously, for example in the way that yet-to-be loaded images on a thread dont stop the text from loading?
posted by vacapinta at 8:19 AM on June 4, 2006

It hangs me up too.
posted by languagehat at 8:34 AM on June 4, 2006

I'll never understand how you non-ad-blocking people can stand to be around the internet for more than 10 minutes at a time. If an advertisers site was causing a noticeable delay it would be blocked by me in three seconds flat, but then I block all ads anyway so I've certainly never seen this happen.
posted by Rhomboid at 2:55 PM on June 4, 2006

why cant it connect asynchronously, for example in the way that yet-to-be loaded images on a thread dont stop the text from loading?

Because what if there's a document.write in there that changes what's in the document? The JavaScript MUST be loaded before the page can be fully parsed, led alone laid out.
posted by kindall at 4:22 PM on June 4, 2006

The JavaScript MUST be loaded before the page can be fully parsed, led alone laid out.

Not true. Matt, or alternatively Federated Media Publishing, could easily put the content in an iframe to prevent this from happening. I presume the content served isn't always the same size, which causes issues. However, iframes can be dynamically resized, at least Firefox, IE and Safari, without trouble thanks to a solar system sized hole in the JavaScript security implementation in the aforementioned browsers.

Google, along with virtually all major direct marketers, use a similar trick to prevent slow page loading on their customers sites. The alternative to using an iframe is technology like Akamai or hardware, software, and bandwidth redundancy. As you might imagine, the iframe trick is a whole lot cheaper.

The simple answer to the question is that the loading of a web page is synchronous. There are some exceptions, like images and the content within frames and iframes, but when loading scripts from a third party using a document.write, these sites need to load first before the rest of page renders, as kindall is getting at. When the third party page is slow to respond, the rest of the page waits to render. If FMP is suffering bandwidth or hardware limitations, this could mean long load times for MeFi.

FMP really ought to fix this and not bother their influential partners to have to code their own solutions. It's the kind of thing that causes large businesses to find advertising that doesn't cause the sites to load pathetically slowly.
posted by sequential at 11:07 PM on June 4, 2006