Google Code: jQuery Outages and a Fix

I’ve posted 2 articles in the past few weeks regarding Google Code going “down” (rather, the jQuery hosted there wouldn’t work), mostly out of frustration:

• 6/3/2010 – Google Code: Did they break jQuery on some sites?
• 6/18/2010 – Google Code’s jQuery hosting goes Down!

There are many pluses and minuses with regards to CDN usage (more pluses though).  There may be a solution…

I want to believe that Google Code hosting is a safe and effective way to use jQuery.  It has numerous benefits to sites that use it:

• Cached Data – The big goal of using Google Code is that every host that uses it, increases the benefit.  Any user that has already downloaded jQuery version 1.x.x will already have it cached in their browser and not need to download it.  It’s hard to say how much this helps, but the more sites that use Google Code, the better it performs.
• Global Presence – Google CDNs (content delivery networks) host jQuery in points around the globe.  This decreases the average distance from the end user that the signal has to travel, resulting in better latency – and availbility
• Page Load – Page’s will only request as few as 2 simultaneous requests from a server at a time (depending on the browser).  As an example, this page uses over 40 requests to complete the page load (damn wordpress and your plugin specific CSS / JS / etc).  Using another host to load content lets more data download at the same time, you increase the parallel nature of your requests

The problem with these outages is more and more sites are deciding not to use Google Code (I’m on the fence, but have faith in Google… for now).  The fewer sites that use Google Code, the less appealing the solution becomes.

A nice solution I saw by Jon Galloway, titled Using CDN Hosted jQuery with a Local Fall-back Copy addresses this issue directly.

An elegant solution that addresses the client need of the site “being up” as well as allows use to take advantage of the Google Code CDN environment.

Tags: CDN, Google Code, Jon Galloway, jQuery

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