Performance: Absolute vs. Relative URLs

Question

What\'s faster? Hot linking (inline linking) to an absolute URI or hosting the resource yourself and using a relative URI?

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Answer 1

This is more to do with lower-level stuff like tcp rather than http per-se. If you get two items from the same webserver nowadays, your browser is likely to pull them over the same tcp connection. That's two http transactions over one tcp connection. This avoids the overhead of making another tcp connection. This overhead is small in traffic terms, but can involve a lot of latency.

OTOH, doing two http transactions where they each go to different servers maybe faster, or maybe not. True, you have the overhead of two tcp connections. In this case they are serialized—one must complete before the second one can start. However, if you were pulling down many objects then the 2nd, 3rd, 4th… connections could all proceed in parallel, masking the latency problem. In this scenario things may go a lot faster as small objects may not be subject to your ISP's bandwidth limiting.

The waters are muddy indeed.

Just keep an eye on the latency and bandwidth. Depends really on the number and sizes of your resources.