claus - 11:58 pm on Feb 25, 2010 (gmt 0)

IMHO, 2 seconds is a bit slow. My fastest site runs around 0.6 seconds per page, including scripts, AS text-ads, and stylesheets. And that is a fetch from another continent (From EU to US). But then, for that site speed has always been a high priority.

However, the Adsense weight (32.7 KB) is twice that of the HTML of the page (14 KB), which is a real page with real informative text-based content. My page speed could have been 0.2 seconds witout AdSense, so it's a weight increase by 300%

The amount of text displayed in the AdSense ads is less than 5% of the text on the page, possibly as little as 1%!

So, whatever AdSense is, it's certainly not built for speed. AdSense is s-l-o-w.

What on earth is AdSense using all that JavaScript for? That's totally out of proportion. I didn't realize until I saw this thread and ran a test. Now I'm pretty angry. This is outrageous. However, at the moment I have no realistic alternative, except running ad-free.