CDN

Jafo

Active member
Will there be any considerations for CDNs? I had to create a product for our sites to utilize origin pull over at Softlayer and even so, found it tricky to hook in everywhere I needed too (i.e. public attachments). Will there be any thought given to this in development?
 
I could certainly see CDN being everyone's friend over the coming years if the price decreases, considering the way the web is slowly decreasing in speed and localization provides far better performance, especially for big boards.

I have to say that kind off boggles the mind though to think of a forum in a CDN setup, pushing and pulling data behind the scenes between locations.
 
CDN abilities could be extremely beneficial for any forum site running heavy image based discussions, where images are stored externally thus able to be hosted at key positions globally. You could apply this to style files and images as well, for image intensive styles. Obviously cost need seriously decrease for CDN to be a reality for most though. I could certainly envisage a few forum types falling into the benefits of a forum package that caters CDN.
 
Don't forgot paster page loads = more potential forum activity and ad revenues = new regos, new posts, average pages visited per user etc

when i switched to maxcdn i gained around 30% new regos/day and average pages visited per visitor jumped 60% - i tweaked page load times from around 5-10 seconds to 2-5 seconds :)

maxcdn has reports as to which nodes across the world users pull data from and for me 80% improvement came from European based visitors utilising the maxcdn content the most.
 
Whilst using a CDN can be useful, I think it is best to analyse your forum statistics to see where your visitors are coming from. Nethertheless, a faster page load = happier visitor.
 

Here is the basis of what I followed:
http://www.digitalistic.com/2008/06...ine-as-your-own-cdn/

I then took the base VB images directory and uploaded all the images....

Then in VB admincp, I went to Style Manager, StyleVars
Scroll down to ImagePaths and change....

Granted not a "true" CDN, but give your site one more content delivery system

The goal is to get more "connections" downloading content at one time to your users.​
 
There is some level of CDN support...
That is, you can put almost all (if not all) of your JS and images on a CDN via a style property. Some templates are not full up-to-date with that just yet, but most are.
As for attachments, I am not aware of option for it just yet.

I use CloudFlare personally, and it works pretty nicely for me... I don't have immediate need for yet another layer of CDN just yet...
 
Have you guys tried W3 Total Cache for Wordpress? It probably has the best possible CDN integration ever, I would love to see something like that for XenForo.

With W3 Total Cache you just add your CDN passwords, select what you want to sync and press Sync. It then uploads everything to a CDN seamlessy. Every x seconds (you select that) it rechecks for new files and uploads those.
 
Have you guys tried W3 Total Cache for Wordpress? It probably has the best possible CDN integration ever, I would love to see something like that for XenForo.

With W3 Total Cache you just add your CDN passwords, select what you want to sync and press Sync. It then uploads everything to a CDN seamlessy. Every x seconds (you select that) it rechecks for new files and uploads those.
i've tried it for my wordpress site unfortunately it screws up some of my wordpress theme. But then again i already manually server wide implement what W3 Total cache does to some extent.

There is some level of CDN support...
That is, you can put almost all (if not all) of your JS and images on a CDN via a style property. Some templates are not full up-to-date with that just yet, but most are.
As for attachments, I am not aware of option for it just yet.

I use CloudFlare personally, and it works pretty nicely for me... I don't have immediate need for yet another layer of CDN just yet...

nice might check out cloudflare as well - currently using maxcdn
 
As an aside (from CDNs) would it be possible in the xF ACP to set a different path/domain for images, java, and CSS so that they can be served from a cookieless domain/s?

I've done this with my IP.Board site by aliasing the cookieless domain to the same local path in Apache, and then entering the new domain into the respective field in the ACP (which is then translated in the templates in this sort of fashion):

[board_url] = inserts cookie'd domain
[image_url] = inserts cookieless domain

(I haven't checked to see if this is already supported ... sorry, been a bit busy - but think it would be a great addition to xF).

Cheers,
Shaun :D
 
I notice a lot of CDN users don't cache their images (by checking headers), believing a CDN is cached already "somehow". These compinies have a bigger incentive (aka profit) for you requesting images on each visit, so the needed info is hardly shared about setting a proper cache-control header on the uploaded content. That one simple trick can literally shave tens of thousands of requests per month of your bill, especially if you think hosting 100 smilies there is a good idea, and they get requested every time someone opens a page x 2000 hits a month. Now we are talking 100'000's of requests.

Just for the record, I use a CDN and all that can be cached is cached, and it's still something I had to look into and make work, rather the CDN being the brilliant thing it could be from the day I joined. Just a lot of sites I see using these services are not taking full advantage of it cost wise.
 
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