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

I don't think this is what your looking for but what are you worried about performance for?

If its your server... then there's obviously no impact as it resides on Google servers.

If its your users that your worried about then there is no impact either. As long as you place it just above the body tag then your users will not receive anything slower than they would before... the script is loaded last and has no affect on the appearance to the user. So there essentially not waiting on anything and even continue to browse through the page without noticing that its still loading.