Does Google Analytics have performance overhead?

Question

To what extent does Google Analytics impact performance?

I\'m looking for the following:

• Benchmarks (including response times/pageload times et al)

Answer 1

From my own experience it has adding Google-Analytics has not changed the load times.

According to FireBug it loads in less then a second (648MS avg), and according so some of my other test ~60% - 80% of that time was transferring the data from the server, which of course will vary from user to user.

I don't preticularly think that caching the analytics code locally will change the load times much, for the above reasons.

I use Google-Analytics on more then 40 websites without it ever being the cause of any, even small, slowdown, the most amount of time is spent getting the images which, due to their typical sizes, is understandable.