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

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.

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!

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?

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.

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

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.