XF 1.5 How to leave a CDN

[Movie Prop Sites]

We are having issues with attachments loading at acceptable speeds so we are looking at using a CDN to solve this issue. However, I don't understand well enough to know exactly how they work and want to understand what would happen if we stopped using a particular CDN in the future? Are all of our attachments still on our server (and only copies distributed on the CDN or is there no longer a local copy of images and those images would need to be "brought home" if we stopped using the CDN? I just don't want to get trapped on a particular service or have a huge headache trying to get our files back.

 

[Mike]

A CDN probably isn't going to directly load the full size attachments, as they're generally served through PHP on your server (to do things like permission checks), so this might not be what you want. (A CDN could serve thumbnails, avatars, etc.)

Usually a CDN would do an "origin pull" approach and simply cache what it pulls off of your server, so that you can just disable it if you want.

 

[Movie Prop Sites]

@Mike thanks for the response. It was my understanding that a CDN could be used to offload the burden of attachments all coming from the server.

If I understand you correctly, using a CDN will only put copies out and about, but the original thumbnails/avatars/etc will always reside on our server, so if we turned off the CDN we wouldn't lose anything expect speed, correct?

 

[Paul B]

Correct.

Assuming it is an origin pull as Mike suggested.