Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube had outage issues (opens in new tab)

Loading JavaScript libraries synchronously should be avoided if possible, making the above solution not a great one.

damn, never thought to do this. thanks for the heads up.

2 reasons:

1. If you're still using HTTP 1.x, sharding assets across origins lets the browser load them in parallel (if set up correctly). You can generally load just 6 assets in parallel per origin, and sharding is a way to get around that limit.

2. A library like jQuery is so popular, and is so often served from googles CDN, that chances are a user already has it in their local cache from when they downloaded it on some other site.

That said, yes - the downside is more surface area that might go down.

One reason is that by linking to external libraries your browser most likely has them cached. At least it was the case a few years ago when I was doing web dev.

Yes, Google can change the logic for auth, analytics, etc at any time and your local outdated copy will be useless, further I believe it's possible that Google returns different JS depending on the browser that's requesting it in order to keep payloads down and performance high.

Our GA is setup through GTM now, that is why it's not hardcoded into our head. Really the most important gain we get from hosted libraries is caching. Since any user that has hit a google hosted lib, which is pretty widely used and distributed it allows them to access their cached version instead of sending our another request.

IIRC Google Fonts aren't easy to download because they vary by user agent.

Funnily enough, in one previous company I worked, which used Linux exclusively, the software was very buggy, and the servers were rebooted daily. We jokingly called that the "Windows solution".

When we proposed adding a daily reboot to cron, the tech lead (which encouraged practices which lead to this low quality software) retorted that "this in not Windows, it doesn't need constant reboots", totally missing the point that just using Linux doesn't make you a developer of reliable software.

Jaded developer here: a cronjob `pkill -9 foo` is cheaper than debugging a memory leak for a lot of businesses. Let the process supervisor handle the process death.

[Removed]

Googlegate 2017. Cataclysmic meltdown where I had to wait a whole 10 more seconds for a video to load as it found another source.

I'm confused, 8.8.4.4 (and 8.8.6.6) are all owned by google, so I'm assuming a 8.8.8.8 outage could also have the others go out?

And 2001:4860:4860::8888, 2001:4860:4860::8844 too…

I am in the same boat. No problems with any Google products today.

Cannot upvote this enough.