I just disabled ShareThis on Theme Lab. It was making the website load incredibly slow all day today. Sorry it took me so long to figure out what the issue was, but I couldn’t believe a little widget like that could bring down an entire site to a crawl. I guess I was wrong, because as soon as I disabled it – no more slow load times whatsoever.
If anyone has ShareThis enabled with accompanying slow load times, I suggest you turn it off until the staff at ShareThis can get this problem resolved. Until then you may want to try out AddThis as a similar social bookmarking alternative.
Update: I have just received a very nice e-mail from JB of ShareThis, assuring me this issue has been resolved. Apparently their servers took on an “unprecedented” overload which caused these problems across the entire network. I’ll see how things progress for the next few days, but hopefully soon I’ll be able to add the ShareThis button back with confidence.
Funny, I thought it was something on my site. I disabled Share This a couple of days ago and noticed an immediate improvement as well. Thanks. S Kirk, http://www.theperfectsense.com.
I think ShareThis has weirdly slowing down sites for a while, not just recently.
I do prefer Addthis and some important Feedburner’s Feedflare bookmarking sites because it appears at feed.
However, ThemeLab loads so much faster now.
just found this post on google about sharethis slowness, yes this plugins still make site load really slowly.
sharethis make my site load really slow, checking with firebug, sharethis use around 1,1mb requesting those little button, eventhough i set sharethis for only 6 major site, they still request ALL button to load.
Thanks for the tips btw, sorry for commenting old post
We pulled it too, after similarly reported delays. Not worth the bad customer experience. Hope it gets fixed some time so we can re-install.