Performance Issues with 3rd party tracking code

[cade]

Is there any performance risk in implementing third party javascript tracking code into the head section of my documents.

I am wondering what would happen to my pages if for some reason, the server running the tracking codes was down or otherwise unavailable - would this affect the performance of my pages?

Cheers,
Cade.

[Purple Martin]

Having the third-party code working in your page will affect performance because there will be extra info sent to the third-party server. However, the performance hit from this will probably be negligable.

If the third-party server is down it should not adversly affect your page.

[keyplyr]

If the third-party server is down it should not adversly affect your page

Of course it depends on many factors, but I experienced periodic negative results from 3rd party tracking scripts. If there was a problem, my page(s) would not load until the time-out kicked in. I finally removed the JS snippets from my pages for this very reason.

This was due to their occasional server down-time as well as just slow router points along the way. You might want to do a trace-route to see just how many router points away they are from your server.

[Purple Martin]

You should be able to get around any time-out problems by calling the third-party script from the onLoad event. You would lose stats for people who click away before the page finishes loading, but you've built a lean and engaging page, right? ;-)