Question

Initially I wanted to use the C# Identicon handler, but there is “parameter not valid ” bug with it.

I’m curious if using Gravatar slows your site down much? Stackoverflow seems to use it fine.

I.E Does having a hold up the loading of your site, or is the image request just handled asynchronously in the background?

Has anyone had any other negatives effects from using Gravatar, like Google giving you a bad rating?

Thanks

Answer 1

Gravatar doesn’t involve any significant server-side processing. The image URLs generated are just like any other, and might actually load faster than images on your own server (because they’re from a different host and will load in parallel)

So no, it won’t slow your site down in any unexpected way.

Edit: See this question regarding parallel requests on each hostname.