I was wondering if anyone has insight on how to deal with slow external ad servers. We try to host as many of the ads on our site as we can, but larger clients insist on running ads through their own servers for tracking purposes. Sometimes their servers will be slow, which significantly cripples our page loads since browsers don't seem to do a very good job of threading the loading of page elements from external servers.

I was considering changing our ad deployment stategy to ignore them on the initial page load, and then load them an instant later using an ajax call.

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience with this issue?

You coudl just phase the ads in using javascript?

I would reccomend, if your using php, to have the files/ads your retriving be cached ahead of time. Just set the cache file to retrieve the new version every few hours or however often you need it to. :)