Report reveals the fastest CDN for jQuery in 2012
Pingdom reports that performance differs significantly between content delivery networks from Google, Microsoft and Media Temple, all commonly used to host the popular jQuery library. All proved to be very reliable, but performance differed significantly between the three. Depending on the type of site, either Google or Media Temple came out on top, with Microsoft's CDN deemed the worst performer in the test.
Since its creation by John Resig in 2005, jQuery has become one of the most widely used JavaScript libraries on the planet. It’s used by more than half of the top 10,000 websites in the world, and keeps getting more popular every day.
Google, Microsoft and Media Temple all offer content delivery networks (CDNs) that host jQuery for free. But which one is the best choice for site owners? Which of these CDNs offers the most reliable file hosting and the best performance for end users?
To properly answer this question, Pingdom (http://www.pingdom.com), a website monitoring service, surveyed both availability and performance of CDNs commonly used to host jQuery. Pingdom performed tests from multiple locations spread over Europe and North America, once per minute around the clock for the entire year so far.
There are three CDNs available that host the jQuery library free of charge:
- Google’s Libraries API CDN (a.k.a. Google Ajax API CDN)
- Microsoft’s Ajax CDN
- Media Temple’s ProCDN (the official “jQuery CDN”)
For the sake of simplicity and symmetry, these will be called the Google CDN, Microsoft CDN and Media Temple CDN for the rest of this article.
First off, all three CDNs proved to have excellent availability. The only CDN with any downtime at all for this entire year so far was Microsoft’s, and that was just a few minutes. All three had, when rounded to two decimals, 100.00% uptime.
This really is what you want from a CDN. You shouldn’t have to worry about it working or not, and the distributed nature of a CDN usually makes it extremely reliable, as this survey shows.
Performance is where the true differences are.
For the performance part of this survey Pingdom chose to focus on recent results (a 30-day period, June 16 – July 16) instead of the entire year, since it’s how fast these CDNs are now that matters, not how they were performing months ago.
- For sites that don’t use HTTPS: Media Temple’s CDN is hands down the fastest in both Europe and North America. Google’s is a close second in Europe, but lags behind significantly in North America.
- For sites that use HTTPS: Google’s CDN is clearly the faster option in Europe, but in North America it’s pretty much a tie between Google’s and Microsoft’s CDNs. Media Temple’s CDN doesn’t support HTTPS.
- The worst performer: Microsoft’s CDN had the slowest average download times in this survey, and if you want an optimal experience for European site visitors we can’t recommend it. It’s more than twice as slow as the other two CDNs in Europe. If you strictly want to reach a North American audience, however, it’s on par with Google’s CDN.
More detailed results available at:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/07/24/best-cdn-for-jquery-in-2012/
On a side note, it’s not so strange that Media Temple’s CDN is performing so well. It uses EdgeCast’s infrastructure, one of the largest players on the CDN market.
Worth noting is that this survey isn’t necessarily specific to which CDN is best for jQuery. It can be seen as a general comparison between these three CDNs since the results should apply to any files hosted on them.
Please note that this was just a brief summary. For charts, more findings and detailed information, including methodology and data sources, the full report is freely available at:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/07/24/best-cdn-for-jquery-in-2012/
Contact person:
Magnus Nystedt, Analyst at Pingdom
Email: magnus@pingdom.com
Phone: 46-709-73 71 41
Twitter: @pingdom
About Pingdom:
Pingdom is a global uptime and performance monitoring service, monitoring websites and servers from multiple locations on the Internet to ensure the best reliability and accuracy possible. The company is growing fast and has hundreds of thousands of users in 136 countries, ranging from individuals to international corporations. For more information, visit http://www.pingdom.com.
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