Google libraries vs. http2

  • JohnPope

    (@johnpope)


    9 years, 10 months ago

    For a long time, I have always used the ‘Use Google Libraries’ plugin on WP sites that I run and speed tests have shown it to be effective.

    BUT… I am just wondering if the usefulness of this has changed with HTTP/2.

    It seems that now it is better to serve everything from a single origin server, rather than pulling files from different places, BUT it is still very likely that users have the google libraries version of the file cached.

    Any opinions?

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  • Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    WordPress.org Admin

    9 years, 10 months ago

    The benefits of HTTP/2’s request multiplexing would mitigate the cost of having high latency to your server, true, but it doesn’t outweigh the benefits of using a CDN. Along with the benefits of caching, as you point out, Google’s hosted libraries are hosted by Google on their probably massive world-wide network of servers. Their latency is almost certainly lower than yours.

    The things that you want to get rid of with HTTP/2 are pretty simple:

    – Domain sharding: Serving your content using multiple domains is actually worse now.
    – Resource concatenation: Because of multiplexing, multiple files can all be sent at once instead of one at a time, so concatenation of resources to a single file is arguably worse overall.
    – Inlining of smaller resources: Server push mitigates the need for this by pro-actively sending resources before they’re explicitly requested.

    CDNs are still good to use.

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