The site I help run has banner advertisements from a third-party provider. Although we have SLAs requiring fast loading from our ad providers, we're finding that page load times are often exceeding 10 seconds (!), but we know that our code is fast and our servers are underloaded.

How do people deal with this? One idea on the table is to stick the ads in iframes, which should allow the page to complete while the ads are loaded off of their painfully slow connection.

Is this a standard practice? Will it fix the problem with slow load times?

we have SLAs requiring fast loading from our ad providers
Exercise that SLA and complain. If you have an agreement in place, talk to the provider to get it worked out or refunded or what have you.

Exercise that SLA and complain. If you have an agreement in place, talk to the provider to get it worked out or refunded or what have you.

I'm on the technical side of the house, not the side of the house to lean on them to actually do what the contract says. In short, though, the business decision appears to be to stay with this provider, whether or not they can actually meet their SLA. So I was wondering about technical solutions to the problem, so we're not left waiting on the ad providers to get their act together.