Last week Microsoft announced that it would be hosting some of the common javascript files used with ASP.NET applications (jQuery, Microsoft AJAX, etc). Google had been doing this for a while through both standard CDN and ajax library calls, but it was great to see Microsoft also put up a resource which hosted the MS specific javascript files that you can’t find else where.
The applications that I work with are already using the Google CDN to load jQuery and jQuery-UI, but I wanted to know if there would be a benefit to switching. The most important thing for a CDN is to be fast, and Microsoft/Akamai is pretty darn fast. Below are the results of a ping test to the servers:
smaglio@sensei:~$ ping ajax.microsoft.com
PING a1363.g.akamai.net (70.183.191.139) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from a-70-183-191-139.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com (70.183.191.139): icmp_seq=1 ttl=60 time=13.8 ms
64 bytes from a-70-183-191-139.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com (70.183.191.139): icmp_seq=2 ttl=60 time=16.1 ms
64 bytes from a-70-183-191-139.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com (70.183.191.139): icmp_seq=3 ttl=60 time=16.5 ms
64 bytes from a-70-183-191-139.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com (70.183.191.139): icmp_seq=4 ttl=60 time=26.7 ms
64 bytes from a-70-183-191-139.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com (70.183.191.139): icmp_seq=5 ttl=60 time=15.2 ms
^C
--- a1363.g.akamai.net ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 13.854/17.711/26.758/4.620 ms
smaglio@sensei:~$ ping ajax.googleapis.com
PING googleapis-ajax.l.google.com (209.85.225.95) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from iy-in-f95.google.com (209.85.225.95): icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=73.2 ms
64 bytes from iy-in-f95.google.com (209.85.225.95): icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=77.7 ms
64 bytes from iy-in-f95.google.com (209.85.225.95): icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=76.2 ms
64 bytes from iy-in-f95.google.com (209.85.225.95): icmp_seq=4 ttl=55 time=74.6 ms
64 bytes from iy-in-f95.google.com (209.85.225.95): icmp_seq=5 ttl=55 time=71.3 ms
64 bytes from iy-in-f95.google.com (209.85.225.95): icmp_seq=6 ttl=55 time=69.5 ms
^C
--- googleapis-ajax.l.google.com ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 received, 0% packet loss, time 5007ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 69.592/73.815/77.725/2.772 ms
