Advertising is a contributor, but it's far from being the cause. AFAICT there are five causes, namely slow DNS lookups due to inappropriately low TTLs, a lack of caching both serverside and clientside, page bloat, an overdose of javascript and an overdose of tracking/advertising (which contributes to bloat and javascript).
Making a Rails site pleasantly fast was more work than it should've been. Rails didn't make it easy to cache page components, didn't make it easy to cache the entire page either, made it easy to inadvertently wait on the database. And here's the key, this doesn't seem to be regarded as a big problem. The rails developers and users don't regard slow speed as a big problem. Is that unusual? Do Django, Magnolia, Magento have a different culture? I haven't noticed (but I might not). Assuming not, the root cause is an inattention to making sites pleasantly fast, and that inattention has simply allowed advertising to have the same problem as the rest of the site's software.
Advertising is a contributor, but it's far from being the cause. AFAICT there are five causes, namely slow DNS lookups due to inappropriately low TTLs, a lack of caching both serverside and clientside, page bloat, an overdose of javascript and an overdose of tracking/advertising (which contributes to bloat and javascript).
Making a Rails site pleasantly fast was more work than it should've been. Rails didn't make it easy to cache page components, didn't make it easy to cache the entire page either, made it easy to inadvertently wait on the database. And here's the key, this doesn't seem to be regarded as a big problem. The rails developers and users don't regard slow speed as a big problem. Is that unusual? Do Django, Magnolia, Magento have a different culture? I haven't noticed (but I might not). Assuming not, the root cause is an inattention to making sites pleasantly fast, and that inattention has simply allowed advertising to have the same problem as the rest of the site's software.