: Do Google/Twitter etc actually use distributed servers to serve their resources? I'm trying to optimize my website and running a few tests using webpagetest.org. I tried the test from Singapore

@Gretchen104

In both cases jquery is being loaded from mountain view servers


I don't think this is true.

As you said, ajax.googleapis.com is 'located' in Mountain View (according to Geo tools). This server is responding (ping) in 24 ms (my location: Switzerland), but with speed of light it actually needs 68 ms. So I don't get routed to Mountain View at all, since nothing is faster than light.

When I'm requesting ajax.googleapis.com, a Server close to my location is responding. So Google's CDN is working as expected.

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@Lengel546

Yes, there are benefits. Excerpts from 3 reasons why you should let Google host jQuery for you:


Better caching

Potentially the greatest benefit of using the Google AJAX Libraries
CDN is that your users may not need to download jQuery at
all........Even if someone visits hundreds of sites using the same
Google hosted version of jQuery, they will only need download it
once!

Decreased Latency

A CDN — short for Content Delivery Network — distributes your static
content across servers in various, diverse physical locations. When a
user’s browser resolves the URL for these files, their download will
automatically target the closest available server in the network.

Increased parallelism

To avoid needlessly overloading servers, browsers limit the number of
connections that can be made simultaneously. Depending on which
browser, this limit may be as low as two connections per hostname.


Intentionally splitting web page resources across multiple domains to make pages load faster is called domain sharding. Doing this allows more resources to be downloaded in parallel, reducing the overall page load time. Most of the U.S. top ten web sites do domain sharding.

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