The Question and Answer Board

[IH Geek [Meatloaf]]

Google Analytics is a statistics program in wide use. I'd be very surprised if no place else you visit uses it.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

While it mentions marketing, it's not directly tied to the delivery of ads. It's mainly statistics - lets the marketing geeks see what pages are most popular, the effect of using different widgets and gizmos, etc.

Occasionally I see reports of slowdowns with google analytics but it's usually transient.

Note to Dave - we should consider hosting the google analytics script locally. That's probably the most reliable way to speed it up.