Google CDN or Akamai
- by AlienWebguy
We combine and minify our JS with Minify - the combined JS is then cached on Akamai. I'm suggesting to my supervisor that we put JQuery and JQueryUI on Google CDN and take it out of our combined JS.
The benefits I see are parallel downloads, significantly smaller Akamai cache hit, and the high potential the user will have JQuery from Google CDN cached in his/her browser when he/she visits our site so no download will be required at all. I also pointed out how pointing to the major version CDN URL //ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js will eliminate the need for us to micro-manage our JQuery version control, and that if a new release introduces a bug, we simply point the CDN URL to a stable minor version of our choice until the issue is resolved.
My supervisor disagrees and thinks keeping it on Akamai is the way to go.
Any insight as to which is going to be faster here? I looked for some benchmarks and references online but they are either out-dated or merely talk about Google wanting to acquire Akamai.
EDIT: Some further research has pointed me to an article mentioning how 'latest version' CDN URL's use short expires headers so it might be more optimal to use /jquery/1.7/. I'm fine with this - the general question still remains.
