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This week I had the opportunity to see the really neat demo of a fellow student's program. Unfortunately, it was written in Ruby, in which I can just about program "Hello World," and since it is part of his thesis, I couldn't get a copy. But, I watched the command line program run.
It connects to a single web site of your choice and analyzes everything that happens - everything. Besides being a neat piece of coding, it throws the reality of today's Internet in your face. I.e...
For commercial web sites, most of the linkage is to ad-servers. They are not necessarily the bulk of the incoming data, but can be by far the most numerous of the links that get resolved in a single page load. Some ad-servers call another, then that one links to another and so on. Some sites seem to exist only for the ad links and without them, the page would load almost instantaneously.
But, the most... distressing, maybe?... part is the time for the ad link(s) to be resolved. I always assumed that a slow web site was just some place that was overloaded, or was on a connection with a low speed connection - that is, it was the fault of the URL that I was accessing. But, not so. Over and over, we could see that web sites hung up because an ad-server didn't respond for seconds and sometimes not at all. It has been a very long time since I did any web programming, but apparently web programmers still have no way, or don't bother, to check for a hung link on a page. Reload the same page and a totally different link is in la-la land rather than responding. Then, sometimes a whole series of them are out to lunch and the page totally stalls.
There is also the disturbing problem of links that have no visible means of support. They send nothing of any size, deposit no cookies and ask for none, but they have to resolve or the page stalls. Not sure what those are. Maybe some web guru can say.
That brought me to wondering just how many websites think they are making money from the ad-server payments, and not realizing how many people are probably giving up and going elsewhere. So instead of selling a product, they make a few cents from the link.
It connects to a single web site of your choice and analyzes everything that happens - everything. Besides being a neat piece of coding, it throws the reality of today's Internet in your face. I.e...
For commercial web sites, most of the linkage is to ad-servers. They are not necessarily the bulk of the incoming data, but can be by far the most numerous of the links that get resolved in a single page load. Some ad-servers call another, then that one links to another and so on. Some sites seem to exist only for the ad links and without them, the page would load almost instantaneously.
But, the most... distressing, maybe?... part is the time for the ad link(s) to be resolved. I always assumed that a slow web site was just some place that was overloaded, or was on a connection with a low speed connection - that is, it was the fault of the URL that I was accessing. But, not so. Over and over, we could see that web sites hung up because an ad-server didn't respond for seconds and sometimes not at all. It has been a very long time since I did any web programming, but apparently web programmers still have no way, or don't bother, to check for a hung link on a page. Reload the same page and a totally different link is in la-la land rather than responding. Then, sometimes a whole series of them are out to lunch and the page totally stalls.
There is also the disturbing problem of links that have no visible means of support. They send nothing of any size, deposit no cookies and ask for none, but they have to resolve or the page stalls. Not sure what those are. Maybe some web guru can say.
That brought me to wondering just how many websites think they are making money from the ad-server payments, and not realizing how many people are probably giving up and going elsewhere. So instead of selling a product, they make a few cents from the link.