Since millions of sites use GA, hosting ga.js on my own server doesn't seem to make sense to me. If I'm not missing something in almost every case users will have their own version of ga.js cached locally and won't need to download it again. Also the DNS lookup is less likely to be performed when a user hits your site as it's likely not the first time he/she uses a site with ga installed. I don't have any stats yet and there are certainly situations where caching ga.js locally on the server does make sense (especially when doing a lot of jquery stuff + google-analytics.com has a ping of above 100ms from Germany). Anyways, a lot of users which could benefit from the browser cache serving ga.js will have to re-download ga.js.

I think at least there should be some better help text available marking the issue with a link to http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55466

Maybe we can collect some numbers comparing the unique visitors of a sites with the downloads of ga.js from google-analytics.com to clarify if caching ga.js makes sense. Anyone an idea how this could be tracked?

Comments

hass’s picture

hass commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Never enable features you do not understand and never change "Advanced settings" if you do not understand the implications. That said - you can leave all settings at the defaults. The GA module works well out of the box by only configuring the account number.

If people block google's ga.js URL for privacy / AD blocker reasons - this feature is a workaround + Google could be down/slow... the module only caches it and does not statically download the ga.js. Google may not tell you about this, but I do hereby.

Nevertheless - advanced features are for advanced users with good understanding of technical implications.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.