Microsoft's Ajax CDN tumbles worldwide • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft's Ajax CDN tumbles worldwide

#41

Post by kamjam » Thu, Jan 03, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

JonnieCache wrote: post #22

kamjam wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often does your average user browse via an anonymous proxy? I doubt most would even know what the hell you are talking about. I can understand for your more clued up or power user, but you give the average user too much credit.

Every time they use a public wifi hotspot. Any time you use a network you don't control and where you have no reason to trust the admin, you may as well be using a proxy. The requirement to trust the admin isn't about the admin MITMing you, but rather trusting their competency in preventing other users MITMing you. Of course the admin could be bad as well.

Fair point. But if they have gone to this extent, they could just as easily inject some code into the HTML no?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804608

Re: Microsoft's Ajax CDN tumbles worldwide

#42

Post by deelowe » Thu, Jan 03, 2013, 4:55 PM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #20

crescentfresh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDN, with local fallback: window.jQuery || document.write(unescape('%3Cscript src="/scripts/jquery-1.x.x.min.js"%3E%3C/script%3E'))

If you do overall page loading times, I wonder what sort of averages you will see comparing this to hosting it locally for all requests. When hosted locally it would result in 1 less DNS lookup, as well it could reuse an open HTTP connection to fetch the resource.

I think for popular CDNs hosting popular libraries(google's jquery for example), the browser would use the local cache. So, I imagine there's a benefit to using a big CDN for those cases.

Re: Microsoft's Ajax CDN tumbles worldwide

#43

Post by jQueryIsAwesome » Thu, Jan 03, 2013, 4:55 PM UTC

dos1 wrote: post #35

k3n wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if you gracefully handle those failures with local fallbacks, then the CDN's downtime is a moot point.

See the rest of the comments in this thread about why the fallback can be painfully slow if the CDN is down. I saw your previous comment about making an ajax request with an adjusted timeout, but this is not ideal for making cross domain script requests for a number of reasons. For one, CORS needs to be enabled. Another is that you now have to create a script tag and take the responseText and jam it in there. This is…

You can easily specify how much time a CDN will have to respond as you can see in my example in another comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5003129

Re: Microsoft's Ajax CDN tumbles worldwide

#44

Post by Benferhat » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 1:34 AM UTC

This is why I use yepnope [0].

"yepnope.js has the capability to do resource fallbacks and still download dependent scripts in parallel with the first."

[0] http://yepnopejs.com/

Re: Microsoft's Ajax CDN tumbles worldwide

#45

Post by Benferhat » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 1:39 AM UTC

kamjam wrote: post #41

JonnieCache wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time they use a public wifi hotspot. Any time you use a network you don't control and where you have no reason to trust the admin, you may as well be using a proxy. The requirement to trust the admin isn't about the admin MITMing you, but rather trusting their competency in preventing other users MITMing you. Of course the admin could be bad as well.

Fair point. But if they have gone to this extent, they could just as easily inject some code into the HTML no? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804608

They're talking about what happens when you load an infected jquery.min.js from cache when you get back to your home wifi network.

Re: Microsoft's Ajax CDN tumbles worldwide

#46

Post by ChuckMcM » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 3:11 AM UTC

dos1 wrote: post #3

More generally, I have never understood why people use these third party CDNs for important sites. Don't get me wrong, I understand the bullet points that the Microsoft's and Google's trot out: User more likely to have it cached, more simultaneously open connections since it's a different domain, perhaps less latency etc. But the simple fact of the matter is if the CDN goes down, your site essentially goes down. Ever…

"More generally, I have never understood why people use these third party CDNs for important sites."

Perhaps its not a core-competency of the company? When you're a small company you only get a few employees to work with maybe none, so you find ways to get the stuff you don't know how to do, done. Whether its contract work for design, or outsourcing operations to the cloud.