What is gstatic?

Answer 1

34 down vote accepted

Google has off-loaded static content (JavaScript code, images and CSS) to a different domain name in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage and increase network performance for the end user.

• increases performance by increasing, in theory, the number of connections the browser can use, by default, most browsers will only make two connections to a single server. While this is configurable, most users don't bother, so having content come from multiple domains, it can open two connections for every domain the site uses. This loads the content into the users browser faster.

• decreases bandwidth by disabling cookies and other HTTP headers for the gstatic.com domain. Believe it or not, disabling headers greatly reduces bandwidth usage, especially if a page uses a lot of static files.

• static content can be offloaded to geographically diverse CDN servers. Google can push all the content to servers that are nearest to you. This is probably more applicable to a normal corporate site, as Google does a great job of pushing everything to a datacenter closest to you. But for a normal company, you could split out your dynamic content and your static content and then pay a CDN provider to host your static content, reducing your corporate datacenter's bandwidth usage, while improving load times for your user.