[mjpizz]

Matt here: I work on a lot of our JS here at Olark - would love to dig into any loading issues you saw! We spent a lot of time ensuring that our latest stuff loads async (http://www.olark.com/spw/2011/10/lightningjs-safe-fast-and-a...) so it'd be great to ensure that we're actually succeeding there :)

Feel free to come on over and chat, or shoot an email to support[at]olark.com

[latchkey]

It wasn't the async stuff. It was more like olark##.olark-server.com not responding randomly which would cause my page load to block waiting for the server to respond. Probably just a server down or temporary outage, but it was enough to shake my trust a bit and just remove it since we were just starting out with it.

[mjpizz]

Ah, how long ago? This kind stuff should be resolved in the latest editions. We load all those requests async now, and recently we started pre-loading a few of them to improve performance further. If you have any more details, shoot 'em over. Thanks for keeping us accountable!

[bcx]

I am not sure how long ago you tried Olark out, but we've made a lot of improvements in how the RPC servers work.

I am still a little concerned about a slow request blocking your page though. What's your URL? Do you know if you are using JSONP?

[latchkey]

Again, it isn't the async stuff. It is:

<script src="http://server.not.responding.com></script>;

That causes the browser to block waiting for a response.

It was a couple months ago, but I think it was olark19 not responding.

While I appreciate what you guys are doing a lot, I'm not willing to be a beta tester for your networking. Stuff like that absolutely needs to be hosted on an architecture that just doesn't go down. Ever.

[mnutt]

Many browsers support an async/defer attribute on script tags now, which will cause them to load without blocking.

[latchkey]

As far as I can tell, the olark js block we are asked to copy into the page doesn't set this on the script element that is pushed into the dom.