Re:Please stop using CDNs for external JavaScript libraries
by dehrmann on Sunday October 11, 2020 @01:17PM
(#24747364)
Remember that the JS CDN thing started 10+ years ago when internet connections were a lot slower and JQuery was the JS framework and only released one new version per year. That means there's a really good chance another website also used it from the Google CDN, and you're browser cached it forever-ish, no DNS lookup needed.
The other thing to remember is old browsers used to cap the number of connections per domain HTTP 1.1 only supports serial requests, so there were benefits to hosting on multiple domains.
Even today, the big benefit of a CDN domain is that CDNs can host static resources faster and cheaper than your webservers. Yes, you can forward requests from the CDN to your webservers, but it's also one point point of failure. What's interesting is that with a modern, JS-only site, the split becomes API and static JS.
The other thing to remember is old browsers used to cap the number of connections per domain HTTP 1.1 only supports serial requests, so there were benefits to hosting on multiple domains.
Even today, the big benefit of a CDN domain is that CDNs can host static resources faster and cheaper than your webservers. Yes, you can forward requests from the CDN to your webservers, but it's also one point point of failure. What's interesting is that with a modern, JS-only site, the split becomes API and static JS.