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From googling: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/web-font-performance/ https://www.keycdn.com/blog/web-font-performance/ Skip to "Here is a comparison of hosting Ope

From googling: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/web-font-performance/ https://www.keycdn.com/blog/web-font-performance/ Skip to "Here is a comparison of hosting Open Sans locally vs Google CDN." They found it was faster to use a Google CDN. One of the things this article suspects is that CDNs will have better world-wide coverage, and therefore overall latency, than hosting your font yourself. I'd like to see a comprehensive study of your counter point, though.

_wmd 8y ago
This test was performed with a single client based in LA, and concluded the fastest font - Open Sans - downloaded in 476ms. The test fails to measure how much of this is setup time vs transfer time, or account for behaviour of TCP during the transfer. You will find, and I will measure this for you if you really want, that setup time absolutely dominates this cost. If setup time is amortized across all assets on a site, as it is when self-hosted, the true cost of the 220KiB font download will be vastly lower -- closer to 100ms assuming a sufficiently warm TCP connection over even an 8Mbit link, and significantly less again with faster links. As for browser-side caching, this is once again wishful thinking and there is no room for it in any kind of engineering discipline
- crazysim 8y ago
  Does Google Fonts even use TCP? It might be HTTP2+QUIC.
pdkl95 8y ago
> "... hosting Open Sans locally vs Google CDN." Both of these are still a lot slower than simply installing the font in the OS (or browser) and loading out of the filesystem block cache (or using the already-loaded font in browser memory). Open Sans is Apache License 2.0, so it should be easy for browsers/OS to provide it as a standard font instead of merely the "web safe" set of fonts.
jve 8y ago
55ms is something, but that chart baseline is not 0ms and makes it look like the difference is waaay more significant :)

_wmd 8y ago

This test was performed with a single client based in LA, and concluded the fastest font - Open Sans - downloaded in 476ms. The test fails to measure how much of this is setup time vs transfer time, or account for behaviour of TCP during the transfer. You will find, and I will measure this for you if you really want, that setup time absolutely dominates this cost. If setup time is amortized across all assets on a site, as it is when self-hosted, the true cost of the 220KiB font download will be vastly lower -- closer to 100ms assuming a sufficiently warm TCP connection over even an 8Mbit link, and significantly less again with faster links. As for browser-side caching, this is once again wishful thinking and there is no room for it in any kind of engineering discipline

crazysim 8y ago
Does Google Fonts even use TCP? It might be HTTP2+QUIC.

pdkl95 8y ago

> "... hosting Open Sans locally vs Google CDN." Both of these are still a lot slower than simply installing the font in the OS (or browser) and loading out of the filesystem block cache (or using the already-loaded font in browser memory). Open Sans is Apache License 2.0, so it should be easy for browsers/OS to provide it as a standard font instead of merely the "web safe" set of fonts.

jve 8y ago

55ms is something, but that chart baseline is not 0ms and makes it look like the difference is waaay more significant :)