[thelist] Implementing a Content Delivery Network

[Mark Groen]

On Friday 11 April 2008 06:54:49 Randal Rust wrote:
> We run a website for the State of Ohio that has about 2,000 images in
> a repository. I am not 100% sure, but I think that having these images
> on our server, alongside the application, is drastically slowing
> things down. To the point that connections are timing out. I used the
> YSlow to check some of the pages, and it suggests a Content Delivery
> Network (CDN).

Quite likely, read/write from the disk is a time consuming process.

> So what would our options be? Set up a second server that is used to
> manage the images? Like images.example.com?

Yup, hardware is cheap and DNS is fast and cached automatically. By using 
multiple subdomains browsers are further able to maintain persistent 
connections and you will see a definite speed increase. More info if needed:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec8.html

Also should help:

# Turn On Compression
# Add Future Expires Header
# Add Cache-Control Headers
# Turn Off ETags
# Remove Last-Modified Header

--
cheers,

	Mark
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